Citation

Xiao W, Ning P, Schwebel DC, Hu G. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2017; 14(8): e14080832.

Affiliation

Department of Epidemiology and Health Statistics, Xiangya School of Public Health, Central South University, Changsha 410078, China. huguoqing009@gmail.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph14080832

PMID

28757551

Abstract

In 2011, China implemented a more severe drunk-driving law. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the law on road traffic morbidity and mortality attributed to alcohol use. Data were from two open-access data sources, the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2015 update and police data. Poisson regression examined the significance of changes in morbidity and mortality. Large gaps in crude death estimates from road traffic crashes attributed to alcohol use emerged between the two data sources. For the GBD 2015 update, crude and age-standardized mortality displayed consistent trends between 1990 and 2015; age-standardized mortality per 100,000 persons increased from 5.71 in 1990 to 7.48 in 2005 and then continuously decreased down to 5.94 in 2015. Police data showed a decrease for crude mortality per 100,000 persons from 0.29 in 2006 to 0.15 in 2010 and then an increase to 0.19 in 2015. We conclude available data are inadequate to determine the effectiveness of the implementation of the more severe drunk-driving law in China since the two data sources present highly inconsistent results. Further effort is needed to tackle data inconsistencies and obtain reliable and accurate data on road traffic injury attributable to alcohol use in China.

Language: en

Keywords

Global Burden of Disease (GBD); alcohol use; drunk-driving; law; morbidity; mortality; police data