See images of medical cases of firework injuries shared on this 'Instagram for doctors.' (Warning: Graphic images.)

Firework or sparkler burns can have large effects on our hands' range of motion.

11 people died from firework injuries in the US in 2024, with most of those deaths involving misuse of the explosives and device malfunctions or misfires.

Fireworks-related ER visits in 2024 increased by 52% as compared to the prior year.

Fun family fireworks turn ballistic

The American Pyrotechnics Association estimates that over 10,000 injuries result each year from fireworks, close to three-quarters of which occur around the Fourth of July. This video shows just one rather explosive miscue.

Beyond burns, fireworks can harm respiratory, auditory, and visual health.

Visualize the components of fireworks

This article provides animated diagrams depicting how different parts of fireworks function. The elements work together through timed mechanisms to produce desired effects.

In the early 1900s, Fourth of July celebrations were so dangerous that a reform movement emerged to make them safer.

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

A gallery of medical illustrations from NIH

The National Institutes of Health provides educational materials for broad use. The institute hosts a Flickr account with many different image galleries, including this one (with over 70 images to date) that illustrate and annotate curious phenomena, from the life cycles of a malaria parasite to the comparison of male and female bladders. Explore the gallery here.

Firework-related celebrations include an annual summer celebration in El Salvador, where residents throw kerosene-soaked balls to commemorate a 1658 volcanic eruption.

Fireworks' chemical composition and internal layout produce their unique displays

The burning of different metal compounds, facilitated by combining fuel with oxidizers, results in explosions of varying colors. The timing and pattern are engineered through the arrangement of pellets and fuses.

Watch these fact checks of medical missteps in the show 'Grey's Anatomy'

This roughly 10-minute video seeks to highlight both medical and filming errors in the popular medical television show "Grey's Anatomy." Inaccurate medical moments in the show include mistakes in surgical procedures, wearing jewelry during surgery, and confusing cirrhosis—which is a scarring condition that damages the liver—with psoriasis, a skin condition.

Fireworks contribute to air, water, and soil contamination and disrupt wildlife

Fireworks displays have far-reaching environmental consequences, including acid rain from displays during storms and microplastic pollution in water supplies. Wildlife has also been seen abandoning sites during fireworks and never returning.

Fireworks make a loud booming sound after explosion due to air expanding faster than the speed of sound.

Variations in rapidly expanding gas and mechanical elements produce fireworks sounds

Chemical compounds designed to vibrate rapidly when ignited produce whistling, screeching sounds, while crackles and pops are created by small star pellets inside the firework, which explode one after another quickly. Fluttering and chirping sounds are produced by spinning elements that rotate rapidly as the firework ascends.

Listen to how medical error affected an emergency physician's approach

Emergency physician Dr. Sarah Gray discusses her worst medical error, what she learned from it, and how medical error and the culture around it lead to physician burnout. In addition to lawsuits, medical errors can lead to guilt, shame, anxiety, and fears of embarrassment, so this podcast discusses how sharing such errors and teaching about them can improve care.

Watch a drone flight through a fireworks display

This video explores the history, construction, and preparation of modern fireworks displays, including creating gunpowder from scratch. Experimentation with fireworks underwater is also featured, but they require special materials to prevent water from infiltrating the fireworks shell.

Prehistoric hunter-gatherers performed amputations and appear to have provided post-op care, according to analysis of a recent fossil discovery from almost 31,000 years ago.

New evidence suggests the eruption's victims died as their blood boiled

While most Pompeii victims suffocated or were crushed, spectroscopic analysis of bones from a nearby town indicates something more extreme: exposure to superheated gas that instantly boiled blood and caused deadly internal trauma.

Experience a century of America's healthcare advances with this medical visualization, tracing a sampling of healthcare innovations from head to toe.

Trauma-related amputations are primarily from falls, then car accidents and related traumas, followed by mechanical forces according to analysis based on global burden of disease data in 2017.

Deepfake videos impersonating real doctors are spreading false medical advice

More than 100 videos, found primarily on Instagram and TikTok in August 2025, promoted products related to beauty, wellness and weight loss. While TikTok removed 94% of content violating its policies on AI-generated content, these deepfakes were watched and shared before removal, undermining public trust in medicine.

Watch a pyrotechnician answer questions about fireworks

Professional pyrotechnician Patrick Cyrana answers the internet’s most curious questions about fireworks, from designing ghost effects and exploring how electronic firing systems work to explaining what it takes to create displays in the rain.

The deadliest fireworks accident in history was Marie-Antoinette's wedding

In 1770, a fireworks display in Paris celebrating the marriage of Marie-Antoinette to the Dauphin, later known as Louis XVI, resulted in as many as 3,000 deaths. Most casualties were caused by trampling from a panicked crowd of thousands rushing away after some fireworks were blown into the spectators.

There were roughly 17 Black Friday-related deaths and 125 injuries between 2006 and 2021

A website called Black Friday Death Count or “BFDC” scrapes news headlines for Black Friday-related deaths and injuries reported around the world. It includes the overall count of Black-Friday related deaths, as well as the context for each of them.

Fireworks usage on Independence Day comes from their celebratory use in ancient China

Burning bamboo stalks produces a small explosion that was believed to ward off evil spirits. As knowledge of fireworks, which initially used these stalks, carried over into other cultures, so did their use to promote good luck and celebration.

The US had about 155.4 million emergency room visits in 2022, and more than a third involved injuries, including poisonings.

Being struck by lightning has a mortality rate of about 10%

Near-immediate deaths are the result of electrical disruptions in the heart and nervous system, causing cardiac arrest, but severe skin burns, temporary paralysis, and blown eardrums are more common. About 74% of survivors are left with a long-term disability, which includes brain damage and changes in memory and mood.

Pyrodrones combine fireworks with millisecond-accurate drone choreography

Drones are outfitted with fireworks and positioned using 3D software to ensure perfect timing and safe spacing during shows. A single GPS error during planning can ruin the show, as happened in 2024 when a drone crashed and injured a spectator due to programming failures.

Skin wounds and burns heal fastest if they occur during the day

Skin cells responsible for healing wounds work more quickly during the daytime, underscoring that the timing of an injury greatly influences recovery time, according to 2017 research. Nighttime burns took an average of 11 days longer to heal than burns incurred during the day. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Watch over a dozen fireworks effects

Adding pellets of salt to gunpowder within a fireworks shell causes them to explode with different colors, but the type of gunpowder used also has an effect. Finely ground gunpowder burns quickly, producing streaks that swiftly burn out.

Black patients are losing their limbs at a rate triple that of other groups due in large part to inequities in diabetes care and management.

The trend of onstage mishaps

In the past few years, performers have seen a rise in onstage accidents. While artists are doing their jobs, they face risks of dangerous falls, flying objects, and audience aggression. This article aims to explain why this trend may be occurring and emphasizes the importance of concert-going etiquette and adequate security.

See what analysis of one man's amputated leg, donated to The Bone Museum, tells us about his otherwise invisible pain.

Leprosy doesn't cause fingers or toes to fall off

The nerve damage that results from infection sometimes causes loss of feeling in extremities so injuries like cuts or burns may be missed. In such cases, resulting infections can lead to digit loss. Fingers or toes can also appear to shorten with this disease because nerve damage can sometimes make muscles in fingers and toes so weak that they're reabsorbed by the body.

Massachusetts is the only state that bans all nonprofessional fireworks.

Phantom limb pain may often match the pain or contortion of the injury that led to the limb loss.

Hear about life as an amputee and how mirror box therapy helped.

Palliative care physician BJ Miller describes his phantom limb pain and itching after losing both legs and half an arm in an accident. Mirror box therapy eventually helped him, alongside physical therapy. This podcast also features neuroscientist VS Ramachandran who explains how he developed mirror box therapy in the 1990s.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which date back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

See haunting images of the plaster casts of Pompeii’s victims

The plaster casts preserve victims’ final moments in striking detail—from their poses to the expressions frozen on their faces. This piece explains how 19th-century archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli devised the method long after the bodies had decomposed.

Explore the chemical compounds found in fireworks

Besides the various salts and metals used to produce fireworks colors, shells are also filled with gunpowder and oxidizers to help fuel and accelerate reactions. Chlorates help strengthen colors, while dextrin, a starch, helps hold mixtures together.

The most fireworks launched from a pyrotechnics suit is 642

Frenchman Laurent Nat, a pyrotechnics artist and performer with over 10 years of experience, set the world record on June 13, 2014. The suit, inspired by clothes worn by professional firefighters, is made out of 100% cotton and incorporates stilts to allow fireworks to be fired in all directions.

See Virginia's emergency stats broken down by date, type, and even body part

This dashboard from Virginia's health department provides a detailed look at various aspects of its emergency care services from January 2019 to December 2024, when there were more than 575,000 emergency incidents. More than 40% of its emergency services were devoted to slips and falls.

A pediatric journal ran 138 fictional case studies, and 61 were cited as real stories

The Canadian journal Paediatrics & Child Health issued corrections to 138 case studies published since 2000, acknowledging the cases were entirely fictional—a practice intended to protect patient privacy that was never disclosed to readers. At least 61 of the fabricated reports were cited as fact in other peer-reviewed journals a combined 218 times, including a 2006 Lancet article alleging an infant died from opioid-laced breast milk.

Two festival-goers were hospitalized after receiving trendy peptide injections, raising safety questions that may extend beyond the event.

Medical professionals have experimented with using mixed reality headsets

Devices like the Apple Vision Pro have helped doctors develop surgical plans for hip and knee replacements using software that provides 3D models and other tools. Virtual screens displayed by mixed reality devices can provide information related to surgical progress, a patient's vitals, and more.

Accidental ingestion of batteries can be life-threatening

Tissue in the body can serve as a circuit path between the anode and cathode of a battery, resulting in electrical burns and gradual tissue erosion. Stomach acid can corrode a battery and cause its toxic contents to leak, making a person sick. Batteries for internal use, such as in pacemakers, require special designs.

Pickleball injuries were responsible for $350M in medical costs in 2023

Unsurprisingly, picklers over 50 account for 90% of the injuries, with the most common being sprains, strains, and fractures. Experts say a substantial pregame warm-up can prevent most injuries.

See the differences between chickenpox and hand, foot, and mouth

This helpful explainer breaks down the differences between these two contagious, viral diseases, which both present with fevers and sores. It includes photos of the sores that are characteristic of both diseases, showing how they have appeared across different skin tones to better inform people looking for information about their own loved one's symptoms.

See how a 2018 fire in Paradise, California, exposed the limits of emergency coordination

This Frontline documentary shows how the Camp Fire stretched and ultimately overwhelmed the complex web of agencies involved in emergency response, including fire suppression, 911 dispatch, law enforcement, and emergency management, with catastrophic results.