Ethics approval and consent to participate
We conducted this research as part of the study protocol # 7633 at Oregon State University with approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), Federal Wide Assurance (FWA): 00003920 to ensure the Common Rule (45 CFR 46) standards by the Department of Health and Human Services. All methods were performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. We did not collect data from individual participants and the study dataset was obtained from existing sources of injury and vessel casualty information: the Commercial Fishing Incident Database, and the Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement.
Consent for publication
We did not recruit study participants and no informed consent was necessary for this study.
Availability of data and material
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available to assure privacy and confidentiality. We are unable to publish or share the dataset as the ethical approval of the study requires presenting the results in aggregate form to maintain participant anonymity. The study dataset was obtained from the Commercial Fishing Incident Database by NIOSH, and the Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement by the US Coast Guard which can be accessed through the agencies agreement process.
Competing interests
We, the author(s) declare no competing interests.
Funding
This work was funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Grant #2U54OH007544-16 awarded to the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center.
Authors’ contributions
SD: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data analysis, Writing- Original draft preparation.
VB: Supervision, Methodology, Writing- Reviewing and Editing.
SC: Methodology, Writing- Reviewing and Editing.
AV: Writing- Reviewing and Editing.
LK: Supervision, Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing- Reviewing and Editing.
We, the author(s) concur with the submission of this report.
Acknowledgement
We, the author(s) would like to thank USCG, NIOSH, and the research interns who coded variables based on the incident notes and assisted to compile the CFID database. We, the author(s) concur with the submission of this report. The results and conclusions in this report are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official position of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Authors’ information
Solaiman Doza is a doctoral candidate at the Environmental and Occupational Health concentration (Oregon State University) with a demonstrated history of working in the field of community health research for the last 10 years. He is uniquely trained to evaluate both environmental and occupational risk factors and conducted several community-based health studies which assessed harmful exposures as well as community interventions to reduce exposure levels.
Viktor Bovbjerg is an epidemiologist with Oregon State University's College of Public Health and Human Sciences. His current work focuses on injury prevention and control, particularly in high-risk occupations, and he has extensive experience using secondary data to inform evidence-based approaches to disease and injury control.
Samantha Case is an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Western States Division in Anchorage, AK. She earned her MPH from the University of Alaska Anchorage and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Safety Sciences at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has worked with NIOSH since 2014 to conduct research on safety and injury prevention in maritime industries.
Amelia Vaughan is a research project manager in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Oregon State University. She has over 15 years experiencing working with coastal communities and has coordinated a variety of worker injury prevention research projects.
Laurel Kincl is an Environmental and Occupational Health faculty at Oregon State University. She has more than 20 years of experience in research, outreach, and educational programs related to occupational health and safety. She has completed research in a variety of high-risk industries including commercial fishing, logging, construction, and health care.