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Abstract
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In 1965, 52 million accidental injuries killed 107,000, temporarily disabled over 10 mil-lion and permanently impaired 400,000 American citizens at a cost of approximately $18 billion. This neglected epidemic of modern society is the nation's most important environmental health problem. It is the leading cause of death in the first half of life's span.
Although 49,000 deaths in 1965 were due to motor-vehicle accidents, more than this number died from accidents at work, in the home, in other forms of transportation, in public buildings, in recreational activities, etc.
Public apathy to the mounting toll from accidents must be transformed into an action program under strong leadership. This can be accomplished by the methods employed to bring poliomyelitis and other epidemics under control, and to make frontal attacks to conquer cancer, heart disease, and mental disease. Federal and voluntary agencies have mobilized to prevent and treat birth defects, muscular dystrophy, sclerosis, and palsy. Such concerted attacks have been mounted by conduct of national conferences at the Executive level, appropriation of funds by the Congress, pooling of resources by lay and professional groups through voluntary health agencies, expansion of research, and implementation of programs at regional and community levels. Basic to this uni-fied approach is identification of the individual citizen with a means by which he can satisfy the inherent desire to serve his fellow man. Accidental death and disability too, can be attacked by such concerted actions.
This report summarizes current practices and deficiencies at various levels of emergen-cy care.
Language: en |