Fatal Accidents as a Global Health Crisis
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/upshot/fatal-accidents-as-a-global-health-crisis.html
Worried about what to worry about? Accidents should move higher up your list.
Worldwide, road injuries kill more people than AIDS. Falls kill nearly three times as many people as brain cancer. Drowning claims more lives than mothers dying in childbirth. Both fire and poisonings have many times more fatal victims than natural disasters. In 2013, the combined death toll from all unintentional injuries was 3.5 million people. Only heart disease and stroke were greater killers.
[...] The study isn’t mere morbid fascination. Look beneath the top-level results and you also see huge variations among countries that are economic peers. This is actually encouraging news: It means that some countries have figured out a much better way to curb accidental deaths — and that other countries might be able to follow suit.
[...] The Global Burden study exists, in part, to provide this kind of all-encompassing view of global, regional and national health, as well as to track progress or setbacks place by place, population by population. The project, which includes more than 1,000 scientists in 106 countries, began in the 1990s at the World Bank and World Health Organization and is now led by independent academic scientists with major funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The new article in The Lancet is intended to be the first of a series of annual updates on death, disability and risk factors (like alcohol abuse, air pollution or lack of physical activity), providing the health equivalent of leading economic indicators. Where data on causes of death is sparse, the Global Burden team fills in the gaps as best it can with statistical modeling. The findings are therefore provisional — the best available evidence, not the final word. Still, broad trends suggest that accident prevention continues to be neglected as a public health issue worldwide.
