Study: Combat deaths high, illness deaths low - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Study: Combat deaths high, illness deaths low

New numbers from military researchers disprove a popular saying among troops in Iraq and Afghanistan: If you were home, you could just as easily die in a car accident.

In fact, service members in combat-related occupations had death rates about twice as high as their buddies back home, ranging from 212 to 262 per 100,000 from 2004 to 2007.

In the civilian world, the mortality rate for people between ages 15 and 44 is 128 per 100,000.

“This report documents that in general, crude mortality rates are lower in active military than similarly aged civilians,” states a Medical Surveillance Monthly Report from the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center. “However, because of war-related injuries, mortality rates among military members younger than 25 years are higher than the rates among their civilian counterparts.”

But here’s some good news: “Because military members are apparently healthy when they enter service and must maintain their health during service, death from illnesses are relatively infrequent,” the report states.

Researchers looked at Armed Forces Medical Examiner reports of everyone who died on active duty — or 24,715 troops — from Jan. 1, 1990 to Dec. 31, 2008.

Of those who died, 94 percent were male, 68 percent were white and 56 percent were in their 20s. Though only 20 percent of service members are in combat-related occupations, they made up 33 percent of deaths during that 18-year period.

Women have a low mortality rate, about 33 per 100,000. Those in combat-specific occupations have the highest mortality rates at 119 per 100,000, including in years when the military is not conducting major combat operations.

From 1998 to 2008, two-thirds of deaths not due to war were accidents or suicides. From 2004 to 2007, 40 percent of deaths were from combat-related injuries.

The overall mortality rate for active-duty service members is about 73 per 100,000.

For civilians ages 25 to 44, malignant neoplasms and diseases of the heart are the second- and third- leading causes of death, after accidents. For service members, the top leading cause of death in 2008 was also accidents, at 25 percent of all deaths. War-related deaths are the second leading cause, at 17 percent in 2008, and suicides were third, at 17 percent in 2008.