The epidemiology of international terrorism involving fatal outcomes in developed countries (1994–2003)

Abstract

We aimed to describe the public health burden and epidemiology of international terrorism (i.e. involving foreign nationals) with fatal outcomes in developed countries. Data was abstracted from a United States Department of State database for 21 'established market economy' countries and 18 'former socialist economies of Europe' for 1994-2003. To put the findings in a wider context, comparisons were made with WHO data on all homicides for each country. A total of 32 international terrorist attacks causing fatalities were identified over the 10-year period. These resulted in 3299 deaths, giving a crude annual mortality rate of 0.3 per million population. The mortality burden attributable to international terrorism in these countries was 208 times less than that attributable to other homicide. Even for the country with the highest mortality burden from international terrorism (the United States), this ratio was 60. There was no statistically significant trend in the number of attacks over time, but the attack severity (in terms of deaths per attack) was higher in the latter part of the 10-year period. A number of limitations with this data set were identified. If a more rigorous definition of 'international terrorism' was used, then this would substantially reduce the total number of such attacks defined in this way. In conclusion, there is a need for better quality data and improved classification systems for describing international terrorism. Nevertheless, the available data indicates that the mortality burden from international terrorism in developed countries is small compared to that from other homicide.

Epidemiological patterns of suicide terrorism in the civilian Pakistani population

“…Terrorism is a major cause of deaths in some of the EMR countries, such as Iraq, where a dramatic increase in violence-related deaths was observed in the post-invasion period as compared with the pre-invasion period (Burnham, Doocy, Dzeng, Lafta, & Roberts, 2007). Up to now, few studies have assessed and compared the burden of terrorism with other modes of injuries (Wilson & Thomson, 2005a, 2005b.…”

Deaths from international terrorism compared with road crash deaths in OECD countries: Table 1

“…Yet other forms of preventable injury are also important and warrant the attention of policy makers. As part of wider work on comparing the impact of international terrorism with other causes of preventable mortality, 1 we compared the deaths from international terrorism in OECD countries with those from road crashes.…”

Epidemiology of International Terrorism Incomplete

“…I wonder why? The work we recently published in the Journal [1] appears to have been the first epidemiological study into international terrorism (that we know of), so we decided to focus on just a definable group of countries rather than all countries. This was to: (i) contain the work load of what was an unfunded study; and (ii) to allow for more detailed validation checks from media and other sources (since terrorist events in developing countries are less well described in the published literature and the electronic media used in our searches).…”

“…Indeed, the US State Department dataset total for Israel in 2003 was 117 deaths from 12 attacks [4]. However, some of this burden may be more appropriately classified as domestic rather than international terrorism, because of the definitional issues we noted [1]. We used the US State Department dataset as it is one of the better organised and widely used worldwide datasets for terrorism, and offered much better data quality than any dataset that included domestic terrorism.…”

“…These issues need to be resolved as best as possible by a well-resourced global review of the epidemiology of both international terrorism and domestic terrorism. As we point out in our paper [1], this should ideally be done by an international health agency such as the World Health Organization. The resolution of the definitional problems is less likely to occur if attempted by the agencies of governments who may have political interests in highlighting one form of terrorism or another, or who may wish to underplay the mortality burden from homicide attributable to the lack of gun control or social justice within their own jurisdiction.…”