[Mortality rate associated to traffic accidents and registered motor vehicles].

OBJECTIVE The mortality rate due to traffic accidents is an information often used while making public health policies. In order to measure traffic violence, a study was carried to analyze the number of death by traffic accidents per registered motor vehicle. METHODS Based on the number of registered vehicles, population and traffic accident deaths, obtained from the Statistical Yearbook (1999), Demographic Yearbook (1997), Denatran (1999), Ministério da Saúde (2000) and Fundação IBGE (2000) 61 countries and 51 areas in Brazil were studied. Traffic accident mortality rate was broken down into registered motor vehicles per capita and the number of deaths per motor vehicle. To assess this relationship, the samples (international and Brazilian) were subdivided into three groups according to the number of vehicles per capita. To test the statistical significance of this relationship, log-linear regression was used. RESULTS The number of deaths per motor vehicles is associated to the number of registered motor vehicles per capita. The statistical relationship is -1.067 for international data and -0.515 for the Brazilian data. CONCLUSIONS To prevent traffic accidents, there is a need of further studies to explain the high numbers of deaths due to motor vehicles associated with the low rate of registered motor vehicles per capita.