TY - JOUR PY - 2008// TI - Injuries resulting from car surfing--United States, 1990-2008 JO - MMWR: Morbidity and mortality weekly report A1 - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA, SP - 1121 EP - 1124 VL - 57 IS - 41 N2 - "Car surfing" is a term introduced in the mid-1980s to describe a thrill-seeking activity that involves riding on the exterior of a moving motor vehicle while it is being driven by another person. Although reports of car-surfing injuries have been published in the United States, no study to date has analyzed these events from a national perspective. Because traditional public health datasets do not collect morbidity or mortality data on this practice, CDC searched U.S. newspaper reports to provide an initial characterization of car-surfing injuries on a national scale. That analysis identified 58 reports of car-surfing deaths and 41 reports of nonfatal injury from 1990 through August 2008. Most reports of car-surfing injuries came from newspapers in the Midwest and South (75%), and most of the injuries were among males (70%) and persons aged 15-19 years (69%). The first identified newspaper reports about car-surfing injuries were published in the early 1990s, and new reports have been published every year since then. Parents and teens should be aware of the potentially lethal consequences of car surfing, which can occur even at low vehicle speeds, sometimes resulting from unanticipated movements of the vehicle, such as swerving or braking.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 0149-2195 UR - http://dx.doi.org/ ID - ref1 ER -