The most dangerous room in your house

Which one has sent more Americans to hospital in the last twenty years: every chain saw in the country, or shoes?

About ninety American hospitals write down what hurt you. 7,326,429 people since 2005.

Chain saws, 10,588.

Shoes, 72,172.

This is the chain saw

10,588 people in twenty years.

Now put shoes next to it

72,172. Seven chain saws.

Knives

153,927, which is fifteen chain saws.

And the stairs

593,336. Fifty-six chain saws.

The whole top ten

Stairs, floors, beds, basketball, bicycles, football, chairs, doors, walls, knives.

One of them is sharp.

All seven at once

One line per room. Left to right is how old you were. Higher up means more people. Each line is stretched to its own tallest point, so the shapes line up.

It starts at ten. Two-year-olds fall over so much that leaving them in squashes all seven lines into one corner.

The kitchen is a young room

The only line here that never turns back up.

The shed is a hill

Everyone on this line climbed the ladder on purpose.

The bedroom waits

The bedroom, the bathroom and the floor all peak at eighty-five. Getting into bed was never the problem.

The bathroom just climbs

Up from ten to eighty-five with no dip in the middle at all. Every other line here turns over somewhere.

The staircase takes everybody

The flattest line on the chart. Twenty-four, forty, sixty, eighty, all much the same. The staircase doesn't have a type.

And then everything moves right

Shade in the last third of a life. Everyone the kitchen loses turns up in the bathroom, the bedroom and the floor.

Almost everybody was fine

89.5% went home the same day. Tripped on a rug, three stitches, a bit embarrassing.

Then the rooms swap round. Twenty-year-olds are in the kitchen, fifty-year-olds are in the shed, and after sixty-five it's the floor.

Over 65, one in four gets admitted. Under 65 it's one in twenty-three.

Get the next one

About one a week, on whatever the data turns up.

Method. National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, Consumer Product Safety Commission, 2005 to 2024, 7,326,429 records from 106 hospitals, of which 78 to 97 report in any given year (median 89, and 78 in 2024). Quoted records are typed in capitals by the hospital coder and are set down to sentence case here; abbreviations are opened out. Nothing else is changed. NEISS is a probability sample of American hospital emergency departments, so these are sampled cases and not national totals. Counts are of the product recorded first for each visit. NEISS reports ages under two in months, so those records are held out of the age charts. Records are quoted as hospital staff wrote them, with clinical abbreviations opened out and nothing else changed: PT to patient, DX to diagnosis, FX to fracture, LAC to laceration, C/O to complains of, CHI to closed head injury, LOC to loss of consciousness, ETOH to alcohol, YOM and YOF to year-old man and woman. Spelling, spacing and word order are untouched. Firearms fall outside the agency's jurisdiction. Shoes are the CPSC category "footwear", which also covers boots and sandals. Product ranks count the 825 codes in the data that carry a CPSC product name; thirteen codes with no name attached, including a blank one, are left out. Chain saw labelling is governed by ANSI/OPEI B175.1-2012; STIHL's chain saw safety manual lists the safety information label as a part of the saw, to be replaced if damaged. Illustrations generated for this piece.