Fire, burns & scalds: injury facts

The figures

Who is most affected

WHO puts burns at an estimated 180 000 deaths a year, the vast majority of them in low- and middle-income countries. The gap between countries is stark: the rate of child deaths from burns is over 7 times higher in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income ones.

Burns are also one of the few injuries where women are at higher risk of death than men. WHO links that to open-fire cooking and unsafe cookstoves that can catch loose clothing, to open flames used for heat and light, and to violence. Children are the other vulnerable group, and WHO notes that a considerable number of childhood burns result from maltreatment.

Where and how it happens

Burns occur mainly in the home and workplace. In community surveys in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, WHO reports that 80–90% of burns occurred at home — children and women burned in domestic kitchens by upset containers of hot liquid, by flames, or by cookstoves that tipped or exploded. Men are more likely to be burned at work, by fire, scalds, chemicals and electricity.

In the United States, the picture is a house-fire picture. The US Fire Administration counted 1,414,191 fires in 2024, with 3,881 deaths and 13,027 injuries, and names cooking as the leading cause of home fires that year.

The trend

WHO reports that burn death rates have been falling in many high-income countries, through a combination of prevention and better burn care, and that the same advances have only partly reached low- and middle-income countries. Closing that gap is where the largest reduction in deaths is still available.

In the United States, fire deaths have not followed the same downward path as fire injuries. The count of fires and the count of deaths in 2024 were both higher than a decade earlier, while injuries were lower.

What a burn costs after the fire

WHO describes non-fatal burns as a leading cause of illness — long hospital stays, disfigurement, disability, and often the stigma and rejection that follow. In several countries it studied, a substantial share of children with burns were left with a temporary or a permanent disability.

That is why burn care belongs in a prevention page. WHO's plan for burn prevention and care treats stronger burn care and stronger burn services as part of the same job as stopping the burn.

By country

England's fire statistics are published quarterly by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. In the year ending March 2026 there were 254 fire-related fatalities, of which 184 were in dwelling fires, and 6,848 non-fatal casualties. Fire and rescue services attended 170,597 fires in that year, 19% more than the year before. The department warns that fatality counts move after a coroner reports, and that the numbers are small enough to swing from year to year.

India's police statistics record a far larger toll and a very different ratio. The National Crime Records Bureau counted 5,971 fire accidents in 2024, which killed 5,888 people and injured 330 — almost one death per reported accident, where England's fires are counted in the hundreds of thousands and its fire deaths in the hundreds.

What prevents it

• Smoke alarms, sprinklers and a fire-escape plan at home. WHO lists fire safety education and the use of smoke detectors, fire sprinklers and fire-escape systems together.
• Safer cookstoves and less hazardous fuels, with better stove design for stability and to keep children away from them. WHO lists this first among its specific recommendations.
• Enclosing fires and limiting the height of open flames in the home, another of WHO's named measures.
• Lowering the temperature at hot water taps, a single change WHO lists that removes a large share of scalds to small children.
• Safety rules applied to housing design and materials, backed by home inspections, which WHO lists as a public-health measure rather than an individual one.
• Industrial safety regulation and compliance, and fire-retardant fabrics for children's sleepwear — both on WHO's list.
• Not smoking in bed, child-resistant lighters, and legislation for fire-safe cigarettes, which WHO lists together.
• First aid that does not make it worse. WHO's guidance is to stop the burning, cool the burn with running water, and get the person to care — and not to apply paste, oil, turmeric, raw cotton or ice.

How to read these numbers

• WHO's burns fact sheet is dated 13 October 2023 and its figure is an estimate for a single year, not a count of recorded cases.
• The United States numbers on this page are national fire loss estimates published by the US Fire Administration and sourced to the National Fire Protection Association. They are estimates built from a survey of fire departments, not a census of every fire.
• A fire death and a burn death are not the same category. WHO's burns figure includes scalds, contact burns, chemical, electrical and radiation burns, most of which never involve a fire department. Do not read the two totals as competing versions of one number.
• Country burn figures in WHO's fact sheet come from individual studies in individual countries and years. They illustrate the burden; they are not a worldwide series and should not be added together.

The observances that campaign on this

Sources cited on this page

1. World Health Organization — Burns (fact sheet) — www.who.int, read 29 September 2026.
2. US Fire Administration — Statistics — www.usfa.fema.gov, read 29 September 2026.
3. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — Fire and rescue incident statistics, year ending March 2026 — www.gov.uk, read 29 September 2026.
4. National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India — Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India 2024: Snapshots — www.ncrb.gov.in, read 29 September 2026.