Animal attacks cost us more than $1 billion a year

CNN — Animal-related injuries lead to health care costs of more than $1 billion a year in the United States, according to a new study – and they’re happening more often. “We looked at approximately 20% of the emergency departments in the United States over a span of five years, so 2010 to 2014, and we looked at all the patients who came in who had diagnosis codes that corresponded to animal injury,” said Dr. Joseph Forrester, one of the authors of the study published Tuesday in the BMJ. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that “in addition to causing pain, injury, or nerve damage, dog bites can become infected, putting the bite victim at risk for illness or in rare cases death.” Holstege pointed out that due to the codes used to identify animal injuries, “it’s hard for them to delve further into exactly why certain animals were related to mortality or related to admissions.” “I think what this article really does is give us a better snapshot in the modern era of the cost associated, and when you start looking at the cost and start trying to decrease health care costs, it’s good to get data like this out so that we can also look at prevention efforts,” said Holstege, who was not involved with the research. “The question is, how many actually needed to go to an emergency department, and could costs have been decreased by either calling the poison center if it’s envenomation with something that’s poisonous, or talking to a primary care doctor?” Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.