The public health epidemic everyone wants to forget
BrigitteChaudhry 4.7.2001
It will be 105 years on 17 August since the death of Bridget
Driscoll, the first person in Britain to be killed by a car. During
those years, countless millions have lost their lives and been
injured in crashes and every year, hundreds of thousands of new
victims are added to those already bereaved and injured.
Unlike other disasters, road carnage gets scant attention.
In 1999, the reported road death toll - 3,564 (similar to
previous years) - was the equivalent of:
5 Lockerbie disasters,
plus 140 Hatfield disasters
plus 50 Paddington train crashes
plus the Concorde disaster in Paris
During the same period 330,159 people were reported
injured.
The true scale of road death and injury is far worse still -
- based on hospital (not police) data, the annual number of
injured is almost double and serious injuries are three time higher
than the reported 40,000
- deaths occurring more than 30 days after the crash are not
reflected in the fatality figures
What is society's and government's response to this mass
disaster?
Well, it's not being acknowledged as such - what happens on the
roads are only 'accidents'. This attitude is upheld in the
coroners' courts, where "accidental death" verdicts are virtually
automatic, and in Magistrates' Courts, where drivers who have
killed as the result of breaches of law are only charged with minor
traffic offences, with the fact of death treated as irrelevant and
not even recorded on court records. The injured have to struggle
for years to receive civil damages, which are often reduced due to
lack of a criminal prosecution.
No department owns up to responsibility for road crash victims.
The DoH has yet to acknowledge road death and injury as the major
public health issue it is, despite the tremendous burden on the
health service (if under-reporting is taken into account, the total
injury cost alone could be over £18 billion). Last year's
DETR's Road Safety Strategy left out completely post impact care.
The Home Office's Victim's Charter so far has excluded road traffic
victims.
RoadPeace, the national charity for road traffic victims, was
set up in 1992 in response to the desperate need of those victims
for timely and accurate information, immediate to long term support
and practical help and advice with complex and confusing legal
procedures. RoadPeace represents the interests of road victims and
has worked consistently over the past ten years to bring to
attention the terrible road death and injury toll and the casual
treatment of killing and maiming by car.
Road crashes shatter lives and impose an intolerable burden on
society. Not presenting the true picture of road danger will lull
people into a false sense of security, it will not make the problem
go away. Road death and injury represent a major public health
issue, the inappropriate legal and political response make it
clearly also a major human rights' issue, both need to be addressed
urgently.
