Gun violence seriously under-studied in US

Medical scientist says studies on gun violence are much more needed as it can help to effectively prevent more relentless killings in public places.

Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who spent a decade fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and cholera in Asia and Africa, believed the key to preventing gun violence is to literally treat it like disease.

"Mass shooting that are happening in public places are definitely contagious. They become more frequent after each event," Slutkin told Washington Post in an interview.

A report from non-profit corporation Gun Violence Archive

shows that more than 57,000 incidents of gun violence happened in the United States in 2016, killing at least 14,000 people and injuring 30,000. The deaths caused by gun violence have become a headache for the U.S. government.

But how can gun violence be transmitted? The key is the brain, according to Slutkin.

"The brain is the intermediary that takes in violence - having seen it, or having experienced it - and then produces more of it," Slutkin told the Washington Post.

However, compared with diseases such as cholera, polio and rabies, gun violence is much less studied than diseases despite the similarities between them, a study found.

Relative to the number of deaths it causes, gun violence is the least-researched major cause of death as measured by the number of papers published, and the second-least-funded cause of death, compared with its death toll, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Jan. 3.

The study of gun violence is also disproportionately funded compared to the death toll it has caused.

If public health issues were funded based on their death toll, gun violence injuries would have been expected to receive about 1.4 billion U.S. dollars in federal research funding over about a decade - compared with the 22 million dollars that it actually got, said the study.

Legislative restriction is one of the reasons that researchers do not study gun violence.

For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been prevented from allocating funding that could be used to advocate for or promote gun control, said a Washington Post report on Jan. 3.

The same restrictions have also been extended to the National Institutes of Health, it said.

There are also philosophical reasons in which injuries are treated differently than disease.

Diseases are public health issues, but it remains a personal issue if one intentionally wants to hurt himself or another person will do so, with or without a firearm, according to the report.

Researchers are often driven by the opportunity to come up with a cure or therapy, and infections or cancer may simply be easier to study than gun violence using traditional tools, it added.

source: Xinhua