This article appeared in the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health magazine.
A little over a year ago, about a dozen members of the Johns Hopkins Child Injury Prevention Network logged onto their monthly Zoom call. For those working in bustling emergency departments, the meeting is a chance to brainstorm ways to prevent the most troubling cases that come through their doors. A member of the group raised a virtual hand:
"Can y'all do something about dog bites?"
Her team was seeing at least one serious bite per month, she said. Sometimes they are comparable to stab or gunshot wounds. Sometimes they're fatal.
Pediatric dog bites rose dramatically during COVID-19 amid stay-at-home orders and a spike in new pet ownership. Since then, "they've been persistent," says CIPN co-leader Leticia Ryan, chief of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins Children's Center.
A joint effort of Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the collaborative aims to bridge clinical medicine and public health to identify, research, and prevent pediatric injuries seen again and again, like falls, car crashes, and, increasingly, children bitten by dogs.
The question set the group abuzz with ideas. The answer was yes.
Fast facts
- 0-9 years: Ages of children comprising 80% of pediatric dog bite injuries
- 62%: Share of pediatric dog bite injuries that affect the head and face
- 70%: Share of parents who said their children exhibited at least one new concerning behavior after experiencing a dog bite
- 3X: Increase in pediatric dog bite injuries as a share of pediatric ED visits over several months in 2020
Devastating and preventable
In 2021, CIPN began expanding to include injury researchers, statisticians, and communications experts. One of the newer members was Vanya Jones, an associate professor at the Bloomberg School and associate director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. In the latter role, her mandate is to strengthen partnerships between Baltimore City government and Hopkins faculty to improve health in Baltimore.
To begin to address the issue of dog bites, she enlisted veterinarian Meghan Davis, also an associate professor at the Bloomberg School. Davis brought on another collaborator: the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter (BARCS), the state's largest open-admission animal shelter.
Dog bites have long flown under the radar as a preventable public health issue, says Jones. Outside of the injury prevention field, "people are really surprised that it's such a severe issue."
But dog bites are a leading cause of injury in children. About half of those injuries are in children under 6, who are often the same height as a dog's face and, compared to older, taller peers, have a significantly greater risk of bites to the head, neck, and face, and need for surgery. These injuries frequently cause post-traumatic stress and can trigger a range of psychological symptoms including nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, and fear of dogs.
In Baltimore, a dog that's bitten someone—often the family's own beloved pet—will likely be picked up by animal control and taken to BARCS, where it may be surrendered, quarantined, or, in rare cases, euthanized, deepening the family's trauma.
For both Hopkins emergency department clinicians and BARCS, dog bite incidents—devastating but often preventable—are among the most distressing cases they see. Both want to see "less bites and people more educated about how to prevent them," says Jen Brause, BARCS' CEO. That would not only help protect children, but also reduce the strain on BARCS' admissions capacity, and improve chances of families and their pets staying together, she says. Supporting healthy pet ownership gives this work a "really important connection to public health."
BARCS is deeply embedded in Baltimore neighborhoods, holding monthly community clinics where they offer free or low-cost rabies vaccinations, spay and neuter services, leashes, collars, and crates. As part of Hopkins' dog bite prevention effort, they're sharing shelter data to map where bites are occurring and under what circumstances—and brainstorming new interventions that could be deployed alongside their existing community programs.
The story behind the bite
The team is now collecting information to design a pilot intervention for preventing pediatric dog bites. They're reviewing outcomes from existing dog bite prevention programs around the world, mining Hopkins' trauma database for information on individual cases, and sifting through 10 years of Maryland-wide emergency department data to reveal broader trends across age, gender, seasonality, and treatment—including whether children required rabies shots or X-rays after dog bites.
But this data has its limits, and may not tell the full story behind the bite.
"Was it really just an accident? Did the kid have food? What was that inciting component of the event?" Davis says.
To fill in these gaps, the team is reviewing emergency department visit notes and child fatality review board investigations, which examine all child deaths and offer the most detailed insights into the most serious pediatric dog bite incidents.
Two risk factors keep surfacing in the early data reviews: children disturbing dogs while they eat, and approaching dogs they don't know—whether at a friend's house or in the community. Both situations involve multiple players: the dog, the owner, the child, and the child's guardian. All of them need age- or species-appropriate tools to make those interactions safe and enjoyable, says Ryan, the pediatric emergency medicine doctor.
"What you tell a toddler's parent is entirely different from what you tell a 9-year-old heading to a friend's house where there's a dog," she says.
To that end, the team will consider what form a pilot intervention might take. It may be a video. It may be age-differentiated educational materials for parents, children, and pet owners. It may disseminate resources through BARCS' existing community outreach. It may be all of the above.
For Jones, who has a background in car injury research, the goal is to find the "seat belt" equivalent of pet safety.
"Someone flying through the windshield—you know what stopped that? Wear your seat belt," she says. "What are the countermeasures for dog bites?"
