Burn injuries and adolescents in Israel.

Burn injury is a public health concern often associated with individual pain, emotional stress, prolonged hospitalizations, permanent disfigurement and family stress. In this paper we studied the avaliable data on burn injury among adolescents in Israel through a Medline search and found three relevant studies with data on this population. The incidence rate of burn injury was 0.46 per 1,000 children aged 5-14 years for Jews and 0.91 for Bedouin. Most of the burn injury in this age group was caused by hot liquids, followed by fire and chemical burns for both Jews and Bedouin, but electical burns occurred more often in Bedouins. Mortality was very low for the adolescent group. Prevention programs in schools since the 1980s have been found effective, but the public health focus should now be geared towards groups at risk.