Last Word
Child Safety: It's No Accident
I met Glaucia Ferretti in 2001 at the airport in São Paulo, where she works for United Airlines. I was in Brazil to promote child safety and the use of car seats, and after talking with me Glaucia decided to buy a car seat for her 1-year-old son, Pietro.
A few days after purchasing the seat, she was involved in a severe car crash. Because her baby was in a child safety seat, he survived unharmed. Glaucia and her husband have since become volunteers with the São Paulo Criança Segura/Safe Kids Brasil coalition, and they regularly train United Airlines staff in child safety.
Car crash injuries are a leading cause of death for children around the world, and in Latin America, rapid urbanization has made road injuries a particular threat to children. In cities such as São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, major roadways have created deadly divides between children and their relatives and friends. Walking the streets of Santiago, Chile, recently, I was startled to see the dangerous proximity of trucks, buses and cars to pedestrians, especially children. Increased vehicle traffic has also meant that children spend more time traveling in cars. Without life-saving safety belts and child safety seats, they are at high risk in collisions. This is a new and deadly reality.
As a pediatric trauma surgeon, I regularly treat children who are victims of unintentional injuries, and I have witnessed their pain and suffering as well as that of their parents. That's why, in 1987, I founded Safe Kids, an organization that works at the grassroots level to educate communities about the importance of injury prevention. Today more than 600 Safe Kids coalitions and chapters throughout the United States bring together firefighters, teachers, medical professionals and parents to share safety messages and help make their neighborhoods safer for kids.
More recently, these efforts have gone international, with coalitions now active in Canada and Latin America as well as South Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In my native Brazil, Criança Segura/Safe Kids Brasil has coalitions in four cities, reaching hundreds of thousands of children. Through a partnership with General Motors Corp., Criança Segura no Carro ("Safe Kids in Cars") takes child safety seat education and buckle-up messages to car dealerships and community venues where parents learn how to install seats and restrain their children correctly.
These efforts are building new momentum for sales of child safety seats. When a voluntary standard for seats was implemented in Brazil in 2000, no locally made seat met the standard. Now six seats manufactured in Brazil (and sold at affordable prices) meet that standard.
With support from Safe Kids, communities throughout the Americas are also carrying out pedestrian safety programs. The model for this work is International Walk to School Day in the United States, which involves hundreds of communities working to create safer school areas through traffic-calming measures. In Brazil there are now pedestrian safety initiatives in São Paulo, Recife and Curitiba. A three-year effort at the Maria Augusta Jouve public school in the city of Curitiba brought an end to a rash of children being hit by vehicles while walking near the school. The message is getting out that children on our streets need respect.
The main goal of all these efforts is to raise public awareness about the risks of child injury and about practical interventions that can save children's lives. Among these are: enforcement of child passenger restraint requirements and speed limits; implementation of traffic-calming measures such as speed bumps; pedestrian crossing signs combined with clearly marked crosswalks; sidewalks and roadway barriers to protect pedestrians; and public education and behavior modification targeted at motorists.
But it is just as important to institutionalize traffic safety for children, working with traffic safety engineers to create more child-friendly environments and encouraging laws that require the use of car seats and bicycle helmets. In 2001, Safe Kids released a "Rate the States" report grading U.S. states on their child passenger safety laws. Since then, 26 states and the District of Columbia have improved their child passenger safety laws. To be effective, efforts such as these must be supported by research on the leading traffic dangers and evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions.
As this year's World Health Day slogan says, "Road Safety Is No Accident." It takes all of us working together to make safer roads a reality. With a multipronged approach and strong community involvement, we can decrease the rate of childhood injury throughout the Americas… and save more children like Pietro.
Martin R.Eichelberger,president and founder of Safe Kids Worldwide, is director of emergency trauma and burn services at Children's National Medical Center and professor of surgery and pediatrics at George Washington University in Washington,D.C.He was the winner of the 2003 Abraham Horwitz Award for leadership in inter-American health,presented by the Pan American Health and Education Foundation,the nonprofit partner of the Pan American Health Organization.