International Collaboration
AgInjuryNews is now the first known international dataset of publicly available agricultural injury reports , most of which are derived from news media. As the struggles for national injury surveillance in the industry continue, AgInjuryNews.org has emerged as a source of data, stories, and lessons for researchers, practitioners and ag safety stakeholders to leverage for novel prevention strategies. These types of stories have supplied farm employers with examples for “Monday morning safety talks” to connect with farm workers about the importance of safety. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other governmental agencies use these types of data to identify and validate fatal injuries in the industry.

Bryan Weichelt, PhD, MBA, has led this initiative, which has continually grown since it’s 2015 launch. Just this week, the team loaded, coded, and published its first set of injury reports submitted from colleagues at the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association (CASA). “We are pleased to be collaborating with Bryan Weichelt and the NFMC team. The injury reports will provide important data that will guide farm and ranch injury prevention initiatives not only for CASA but for other stakeholders and farm safety organizations as well,”  said Marcel Hacault, Director at CASA.

In 2019, the AgInjuryNews team has scrubbed nearly 50,000 news reports for inclusion/exclusion, and has loaded and coded 1100 unique media reports on almost 1000 incidents. “It is emotinally difficult to read and code these reports every day, but it is also rewarding to know these data are helping so many organizations across the US, and abroad”, said Emily Redmond, data specialist for the initiative . To stay in touch with the team’s efforts or to create custom email alerts for yourself, sign up for a free account on AgInjuryNews.org. You can also follow their efforts on Twitter, where just over one tweet per day has yielded approximately 76,545 impressions in the past year – @AgInjuryNews
This is the third issue of the AgInjuryNews quarterly newsletter. We hope that these will keep our users and collaborators better informed of ongoing initiatives and milestone achievements. As always, if you have any questions, please connect with us.

Data Analyses
The team is continually assessing opportunities for research and utility. We are often surprised at the new uses and ideas – from on-farm tailgate safety talks to a formal assessment of tractor rollover cases. If you or a colleague are interested in accessing data or collaborating on a unique topic, please do not hesitate to connect with us. 
ESRI ArcGIS Provides New Avenues for Geospatial Injury Analyses
This map shows the distribution of AgInjuryNews users (black dots) against our current database of agricultural injuries (colored counties) as of 11/25, using our recently acquired ESRI ArcGIS program. While not all counties in the US had Agricultural, Fishing, and Forestry (AFF) injuries, some counties had a high number of agricultural injuries, as shown by the orange and red-colored counties. This GIS program enables us to investigate the geographical distribution of injuries alongside other data sources such as the National Agricultural Statistics Survey to more deeply understand how to assess and intervene in agricultural health and safety.

Farm and Agricultural Injury Classification (FAIC) Code Update
The FAIC (ASABE Standard S575.1) is in the process of being updated for the first time since 2002. With the demise of agricultural injury surveillance by NIOSH few years ago, it is even more important that those interested in agricultural injury surveillance use accepted coding structures to report new agricultural injury data. Injury data that is coded uniformly by researchers helps provide comparable data across states, regions, and nationally. Improvements to the FAIC code include a Decision-Tree, key coding points that serve as instructional guidelines, and several case examples of properly applying the FAIC code. There is also a new code, FAIC-10 – Undetermined. This code was added to capture cases of clear interest to agricultural safety professionals but for which there is inadequate information to assign a more specific code. The FAIC update is working its way through the ASABE standards approval process, and is expected to be published as S575.2 Farm and Agricultural Injury Classification Code in late 2019 or early 2020.

Note for Media/Journalists
Please remember that with all agricultural injury surveillance statistics, there is usually a large handful of caveats. Agriculture is an evolving and decentralized industry. For this and a number of other reasons, injuries are very difficult to monitor. AgInjuryNews can provide a decent picture of fatal injury counts, and a glimpse into non-fatal traumatic injury. The reality – no one has a handle on the numbers/severity/cost of non-fatal injuries in the industry. Further, no one really has a solid count of exposures either – including full-time workers, part-time workers, volunteers, child/youth in the worksite, agritourism customers, or public roadway collisions (e.g., car collides with unmarked farm equipment pulled by a tractor). 
State Fatality Reports 
The AgInjuryNews team has been collaborating with partners at the University of Wisconsin Extension and the Department of Health Services (DHS) to resurrect the annual Wisconsin Farm Fatality Report . The work in Marshfield, l ed by PI Bryan Weichelt and Emily Redmond, is currently funded through Clinical Translational Science Awards (CTSA) and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR). This fatality report had been a popular and widely distributed document compiled and published by UW for decades, but was discontinued in 2006. With data derived from DHS death certificates and news media reports from AgInjuryNews.org, the report summarizes many aspects of fatal injuries in Wisconsin agriculture. The team expects the first report to be published in early 2020.

The Pennsylvania Farm Fatality Report has been active for many years. This past year, the team at Penn State began to leverage AgInjuryNews.org data to help supplement their efforts. Coupled with death certificates and other reports, their team pulls fatalities from AgInjuryNews to compile the most complete picture possible. If your state has interest in something similar, please feel free to reach out to us with questions. 

North American Agricultural Safety Summit, Raising Safety 2020: Cultivating a Culture of Safety
The summit will match evidence-based safety interventions with production practices and emerging safety issues. Network with agricultural safety and agribusiness leaders; gain access to best practices and programs for agricultural workers. Hosted by the Agricultural Safety and Health Council of America (ASHCA).  Like previous ASHCA-hosted summits, the event will focus on strengthening relationships to identify, test and implement cost-effective, practical safety strategies to enhance the well-being of workers in U.S. agriculture.

This is a great way to not only network with other agricultural safety and health leaders, but to get inspired with interactive ways to stay up to date and to promote Agricultural safety and health. The Learning Labs presented during the summit will be a hands-on approach to learning about safety and health issues within our agricultural community.

We plan to host an AgInjuryNews learning lab at the event. Our team has also submitted several abstracts and are hopeful we will be presenting multiple posters. 

We look forward to seeing you in person at the ASCHA Summit in Las Vegas - March 19-20, 2020.

Software/Website updates
Several enhancements have been rolled out to improve usability. All results are now sorted by incident date instead of article publication date, with the most recent incidents shown first. The labels and text have been darkened to improve readability. The font adjustment tools on the report details page have also been revised so that users can personalize the size and boldness of the on-screen text and it will be recalled automatically on future page loads. Certain fields that were irrelevant and unused for incident tracking have been removed from the report details page and other fields were revised for clarity (e.g., separating County from City/Region).

Additional front-end enhancements are coming soon. This will include improvements to the filter options including improved sorting as well as showing only the filter options that have results available. Improvements will also be made so that printed pages will be more suited for paper, useful if needing to print off a filtered incident list or specific detail pages.
Citing AgInjuryNews
To view an updated listing of peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from the work related to AgInjuryNews, please visit our Learn More page . If interested in citing the system/data, please use one of these:

Weichelt B, Heimonen T, Gorucu S, Redmond E, Vechinski J, Pflughoeft K, Bendixsen C, Salzwedel M, Scott E, Namkoong K, Purschwitz M, Rautiainen R, Murphy DJ. Redesigning a Sentinel Surveillance System for Collecting and Disseminating Near Real-Time Agricultural Injury Reports: System Usability Study. JMIR Form Res 2019;3(3):e13621. DOI: 10.2196/13621

Weichelt, B., Salzwedel, M., Heiberger, S., Lee, B.C. (2018). Establishing a Publicly Available National Database of U.S News Articles Reporting Agriculture-Related Injuries and Fatalities. American Journal of Industrial Medicine. 61(8), 667-674. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.22860

The Core Team
Bryan Weichelt PhD, MBA, Associate Research Scientist, NFMC
Emily Redmond 
Research Coordinator & Data Specialist, NFMC
Serap Gorucu PhD,
Penn State University
Meet the New Team Members!
Matt Pilz
Solutions Developer, NFMC

Matt develops and maintains the technical backend and infrastructure for AgInjuryNews.org and related NFMC applications. With multiple degrees in web technologies and, as a three-time grand prize winner of Intel-sponsored app competitions, Matt brings a wealth of technical expertise to the department. It is Matt's goal to continue refining AgInjuryNews.org so that the experience is as efficient and user-friendly as possible.
Rick Burke, MPH
Research Specialist, NFMC

Rick performs much of the analytics behind AgInjuryNews.org. He has experience in multivariate biostatistics and geospatial analytics, including producing maps showcasing various relationships seen within the system. Rick aims to help increase the outreach and appeal of AgInjuryNews.org through the exploration of novel ways to utilize and apply this database for health and safety research.
Megan Sauer, Research Assistant, NFMC

Megan reads through ag-related injury reports and interprets and inputs data into Case Report Forms for AgInjuryNews.org and helps develop the AgInjuryNews quarterly e-newsletter. Her educational background in Health Information Management helped hone her skills with data interpretation and guidelines for data input. With over a decade of writing experience, Megan also helps format and add any information for the AgInjuryNews Quarterly e-Newsletter.  

Contributors to this Issue
In addition to our Core Team the following have contributed to this issue of the AIN Newsletter: Dennis Murphy, Marcel Hacault, and Scott Heiberger. Thank you!

Follow Us
This is the third issue of the AgInjuryNews quarterly e-newsletter. To unsubscribe, email nccrahs@marshfieldclinic.org