IOWA CITY — A report showing that farmers accounted for nearly one-third of Iowa worker deaths last year should draw more attention to prevention and safety, said an official who released the data.
According to the Iowa Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation program, 79 workers suffered a traumatic death while working in Iowa in 2007, including 22 farmers.
Of the remainder, 23 truckers died in vehicle crashes, more than a dozen workers died at industrial or commercial jobs and the rest were a mix of occupations.
"When one-third of them are farmers, that's a significant chunk," said Murray Madsen, chief investigator of the program, based at the University of Iowa College of Public Health.
The deaths do not include heart attacks, disease or other non-traumatic causes.
Madsen said the number of farmer deaths were 25 percent under the 10-year average in both 2006 and 2007.
"Two years never makes a trend in my mind, but those are data points on the right side of the average," he said.