[Report 1971] / Medical Officer of Health, Cardigan.

  • Cardigan (Wales) n 82058909.
Date:
1971
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1971] / Medical Officer of Health, Cardigan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    (iii) In recent years there have been about 7,000 deaths annually in Great Britain, 90,000 serious injuries and a quarter of a million slight injuries due to road accidents. In 1971, the exact number of people killed on the roads was 7,696. This number of deaths for 1971 was 1,000 more than the number of American Service- men killed in Vietnam in the two years 1970 and 1971. Road traffic accidents are the chief cause of deaths, among males up to the age of forty, numbering 30 per cent more than respiratory diseases, 50 per cent more than the cancers, twice the heart diseases and eight times the infectious diseases. Deaths of females from traffic accidents are about half those of males, but even so, up to the age of forty they rank third after respiratory diseases and tile cancers, and kill twice as many as do infectious diseases (Registrai General 1971) . In 1972 the Department of the Environment published a review of road deaths in Britain and in this review it was stated that No fewer than 37,500 fatal and serious casualties in 1970 were drivers or front-seat passengers of cars or light vans. If everyone had taken idle trouble to buckle on the bolts that were hanging unused in their vehicles, some 15,000 of these casualties would have been avoided. This statement is supported by the experience in the state of Victoria, Australia where compulsory seat-belt wearing came into force on Boxing Day 1970. When road deaths for the first six months of 1971 (when Victoria alone had intro- duced compulsion) were compared with the corresponding period in 1970, it was found that in Melbourne the number of deaths had been reduced by 24.8 per cent compared with a reduction of only 1.5 per cent for the rest of metropolitan Australia. In Britain in 1970 it was possible to obtain information from survivors re- garding 2,264 drivers or front seat passengers killed on the roads and it was