Building national estimates of the burden of road traffic injuries in developing countries from all available data sources: Iran
- 1Harvard University Initiative for Global Health, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- 2Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
- Dr K Bhalla, Research Scientist, Harvard University Initiative for Global Health, 104 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA, USA; kavi_bhalla{at}harvard.edu
- Accepted 6 January 2009
Abstract
Objective: To use a range of existing information sources to develop a national snapshot of the burden of road traffic injuries in one developing country—Iran.
Methods: The distribution of deaths was estimated by using data from the national death registration system, hospital admissions and outpatient visits from a time-limited hospital registry in 12 of 30 provinces, and injuries that received no institutional care using the 2000 demographic and health survey. Results were extrapolated to national annual incidence of health burden differentiated by age, sex, external cause, nature of injuries and institutional care.
Results: In 2005, 30 721 Iranians died annually in road traffic crashes and over one million were injured. The death rate (44 per 100 000) is the highest of any country in the world for which reliable estimates are available. Road traffic injuries are the third leading cause of death in Iran. While young adults are at high risk in non-fatal crashes, the elderly have the highest total death rates, largely due to pedestrian crashes. While car occupants lead the death count, motorised two-wheeler riders dominate hospital admissions, outpatient visits and health burden.
Conclusions: Reliable estimates of the burden of road traffic injuries are an essential input for rational priority setting. Most low income countries are unlikely to have national injury surveillance systems for several decades. Thus national estimates of the burden of injuries should be built by collating information from all existing information sources by appropriately correcting for source specific shortcomings.
Footnotes
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Funding: This work was funded by a grant from the World Bank Global Road Safety Facility. The funding agency did not play any role in the study design, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report, or in the decision to submit the paper for publication.
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Competing interests: None.
