May 06, 2016 – May 2016 marks the 28th annual National Trauma Awareness Month, a call to focus on injury prevention and raising trauma awareness. Traumatic injuries are the number one cause of death for Americans between the ages of 1 and 46 years old, and the number three cause of death overall in the United States.
And yet, the majority of the population doesn’t have the training, or the tools, to stop major bleeding. A recent U.S. survey suggests very few Americans have taken a first aid course in the last two years, and those who did probably didn’t get taught to control bleeding.
Severe bleeding can kill before an ambulance arrives and is one of the leading causes of preventable death both on the battlefield and in the civilian setting.