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Abstract
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Road deaths and injuries have to be considered in the same way as any other epidemic falling within the scope of public health administration and reduction brought about by application of the same procedure that has been found to be successful in resolving other para-medical problems such as those of criminology.
Etiological research is necessary initially and the results of the investigation applied experimentally to the reduction of incidence and, although the standard procedure has been successfully applied to, for example, the rheumatoid arthritic group of diseases, it has not yet been applied on a sufficiently massive scale to the problem of reducing death from road accidents, although there is general agreement that the problems concerned are physiological or para-medical.
Two examples may be quoted where an orthodox approach has produced effective results. In the middle 1920's a small group was formed to consider the rheumatoid-arthritic diseases and shortly before the war the Royal College of Physicians in London laid down a research program, and a wider group was formed to which every medical member subscribed £10, to form the nucleus of a research fund. Similarly, in the British aircraft industry it is widely recognized that the work of the Royal Air force Institute of Aviation Medicine has contributed enormously to safety in flying - even to present day civilian passenger flying, - but there is, as yet, no parallel organization to determine the ingredients of road safety, not merely in England, but in Europe generally.
Diseases have to be collected and grouped systematically as do animals and plants before the biology of the organisms can be studied, and road accidents, being a problem of recent decades, have not yet received the attentions of a Linnaeus to formulate an epicrisis. The comparison between the road accident group of diseases and the rheumatoid group seems valid because just as the similarity between rheumatoid arthritis and osteo-arthritis is perhaps the name, so road accidents are grouped together though the causes may be as varied as inadequate design of car, or road, road demarcation or driver behavior.
There is an initial difficulty to be overcome when dealing with road accident research, which unfortunately applies also to many scientific problems with practical applications. Research of this nature has come to be below the dignity of some practitioners to whom "research" has become a sacred cow on a mountain top. As a result of such uncritical worship, research is keeping low company and has declined in quality because of the state of mind that imagines time, effort and money of the intellectual elite should not be wasted on items below their dignity when such important work is awaiting them as finding out about things that nobody wants to know.
Such intellectual snobbery means that causes and prevention of death from road accidents are still known only imperfectly, and until there is more information available, and practical applications are made of research into causes and prevention of road accidents, pain and misery will continue and a load applied to both national and world economy.
Fortunately, however, there are many able investigators who view the problem of accident reduction differently and it may be of interest to review some aspects of research and current development that bear on the subject. |