Firearm-Related Injury and Death: A U.S. Health Care Crisis in Need of Health Care Professionals

About the Authors:

Darren B. Taichman

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation: Executive Deputy Editor, Annals of Internal Medicine

Howard Bauchner

Affiliation: Editor-in-Chief, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and the JAMA Network

Jeffrey M. Drazen

Affiliation: Editor-in-Chief, New England Journal of Medicine

Christine Laine

Affiliation: Editor-in-Chief, Annals of Internal Medicine

Larry Peiperl

Affiliation: Chief Editor, PLOS Medicine

ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1237-4846Citation: Taichman DB, Bauchner H, Drazen JM, Laine C, Peiperl L (2017) Firearm-Related Injury and Death: A U.S. Health Care Crisis in Need of Health Care Professionals. PLoS Med14(10): e1002430. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002430

Published: October 9, 2017

Copyright: © 2017 Taichman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: DT and CL are paid employees of the Annals of Internal Medicine and the American College of Physicians. HB has nothing to disclose. JMD is a full-time employee of the Massachusetts Medical Society, owner and publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine. LP is an employee of Public Library of Science and works as a per-diem physician at UCSF.

Provenance: Not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.

Note: This article is being published in Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), New England Journal of Medicine, and PLOS Medicine.

What would happen if on one day more than 50 people died and over 10 times that many were harmed by an infectious disease in the United States? Likely, our nation’s esteemed and highly capable public health infrastructure would gear up to care for those harmed and study the problem. There would be a rush to identify the cause, develop interventions, and refine them continually until the threat is eliminated or at least contained. In light of the risks to public health (after all, over 500 people have been harmed already!), health care professionals would sound the alarm. We would demand funding. We would go to conferences to learn what is known and what we should do. We would form committees at our institutions to plan local responses to protect our communities. The United States would spend...