Injury Prevention

As a society, we have put into practice many public health messages related to risky behavior. Preventing injury or disease is factored into new laws and regulations, sports rules and in product design. We’re beginning to rethink how to plan for large scale natural disasters, in the aftermath of the Gulf Coast storms in 2005. We may have softened the hard edges of risk but people still get hurt and killed – you can’t possibly prepare for seemingly random accidents; you can’t design away poor or impaired judgment, you can’t eliminate injury in high energy sports, you can’t predict nature’s option to redefine worst case scenario.
 
Laws and rules can be a good thing but these alone do not always effect the changes one might hope for. For example, seat belt use is mandatory and most new cars come equipped with airbags, crash test data and rollover ratings. That might lead one to expect a dramatic reduction in highway fatalities. With higher speed cars and perhaps a false sense of security based on the safety features we’ve taken for granted, people are still getting killed on America’s highways at a rate that remains at about 800 per week. About six in ten people who die in car wrecks do not wear their seatbelt. Alcohol fatalities, despite years of decline, perhaps related to years of preaching about drunk driving, are steadily increasing (about 40 percent of fatalities on the road are related to drunk driving). Motorcycle-related deaths have been steadily on the rise too.

With so much attention paid to safety one might expect the rate of spinal cord injury to drop. That has not shown up in the statistics, although it is clear that fewer people are getting paralyzed by gunshots than they were 10 years ago.

Public health initiatives target prevention programs toward “at risk” audiences, especially in schools. Preaching only goes so far. The key to prevention is awareness. Awareness of risk, of consequence. Awareness of choice.