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Preventing
Vehicular Injuries
(HealthScoutNews)
-- Forcing people to use seat belts, cracking down on how children
are restrained in vehicles -- and letting police stop cars and
hand out tickets for these reasons will cut down on vehicular
crash fatalities and injuries, says the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC).
Add rewarding
seat belt usage and alerting the public to increased police patrols,
and you just might make a dent in the more than 41,000 deaths,
500,000 hospitalizations and 4 million emergency room visits that
are attributed to motor vehicle accidents, the agency says.
"We wanted
to try and do something about motor vehicle injuries to children,"
says Dr. Stephani Zaza, chief of the CDC's community guide branch
in Atlanta, Ga. "We wanted to figure out what the one thing [was]
we can do to improve rates of injuries and figure out what the
biggest thing [is] we could do to get children buckled up in child
safety seats."
To figure
out how to get parents to use child safety seats, Zaza formed
a task force of health care providers, state and local health
department personnel, academicians and policy makers. They reviewed
studies of community-based programs that increased the use of
child safety seats and seat belts. The task force also tried to
find out the best ways to reduce drunk driving.
In 17 states
and the District of Columbia, police can stop a vehicle just because
the adults inside aren't using their seat belts. In other states,
police need more reason than that to stop a car -- say, running
a stop sign -- before they can hand out a ticket for a seat-belt
violation. However, all 50 states have laws that allow police
to stop a car solely because a child is not restrained correctly,
Zaza says.
Injuries from
motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death for people
between the ages of 1 and 34, according to the National Highway
Transportation Safety Administration.
"We identified
five key strategies and then searched the literature to look for
studies that evaluated the success of those strategies," Zaza
explains.
The panel
strongly recommended:
- requiring
the use of child safety seats and seat belts
- giving
child safety seats to parents and educating them on their use
- allowing
police to stop a vehicle solely for an observed belt law violation
- enhancing
safety belt enforcement by such things as stepping up enforcement
at certain locations and times to target violations
- lowering
the legal blood alcohol concentration for adult driver to 0.08
percent, a level that many, but not all, states now enforce.
"What we found
was that laws requiring the use of child safety seats were very
effective in getting parents to use the seats," Zaza says. "And
we found that if enforcement was enhanced, if police used check
points and increased patrols, child safety seat use increased."
"We've got
one going on in Atlanta, called the 'Click It or Ticket Campaign',"
Zaza says. "They've been telling parents and drivers that there's
going to be check points and increased patrols looking for kids
in child safety seats. And if they're not in the seats, they get
a ticket. These kinds of campaigns are effective."
Zaza says
that programs that get child safety seats to parents and drivers
work well also. "We know of programs that provide a seat for free,
as a giveaway, or they'll loan parents a child safety seat or
they'll rent it to them. We found that those were very effective."
These recommendations
were in a recent issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality
Weekly Report, Recommendations and Reports.
Getting car
safety seats to families works extremely well, according to the
National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Hispanic lobbying
organization.
"It's a really
big hit with our community-based affiliates," says Lisa Navarrete,
a spokeswoman for the council in Washington, D.C. "We have distributed
car seats to at least 50,000 families in a program that started
two years ago -- a joint program with the National Safety Council
and General Motors."
The free car
seats coupled with education have been a boon to the Hispanic
community, Navarrete says. "Given how many Hispanic families are
near or below the poverty line, this is a particular issue. And
the statistics are pretty grim."
"Forty percent
of all American kids ride without any kind of restraints in the
car," she adds. "Use of a car seat reduces a child's risk of death
by 70 percent."
For more information
on child passenger safety, visit the
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
or the National
Seat Belt Coalition.
Reference
Source 101
For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick
Prevention Resources".
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