For my graphic on emergency room visits over time and the other on things that get stuck, I used data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which is maintained by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
You can download the data, grouped annually, as Excel files and then do some munging to get the data in order. It’s not a huge burden, but it’s not that fun either. Or, if you want to skip straight to the good stuff, you can use the neiss R package by Hadley Wickham to import the data in R.
I’d go with the latter.
