[Report] Fatal Accidents as a Global Health Crisis

From the 16 February 2015 New York Times article

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 braincancer. 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.

These findings, published late last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, are from the “Global Burden of Disease” study, an international collaboration led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which tracks the annual toll of 240 causes of death for men and women in 20 age groups across 188 countries. 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.

Read the entire article here

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