Health Highlights: July 30, 2018

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Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:

Gun Murders on the Rise in U.S.

Gun murders are on the rise in the U.S. and are the most common type of murder, a federal government study says.

Between 2010 and 2016, gun murders accounted for more than 70 percent of all homicides. Knives and other tools that cut or pierced were the second most common method of murder, and suffocation was the third, CNN reported.

Rates of all three types of murder were stable between 2010 and 2014, but gun murders rose 31 percent between 2014 to 2016, from 11,008 to 14,415. Rates of the other two top methods of murder were flat between 2014 and 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2016, the number of gun murders was about 30 times higher than suffocation murders (502) and about 8 times higher than knife murders (1,781), CNN reported.

The study was published Thursday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

A spike in violence in a few cities, including Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis and Kansas City, may have contributed to the sharp rise in the number of gun murders in the U.S. in recent years, Daniel Webster, a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNN.

Those cities had “fairly notable and large increases in homicides over the period in question,” while “other places have been more flat,” according to Webster, who was not involved in the CDC study.

“What is most volatile over time and space is gun homicides,” he told CNN.

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