BACKGROUND Worldwide, injuries from road traffic collisions are a rapidly growing problem in terms of morbidity and mortality. The UK has amongst the worst records in Europe with regard to child pedestrian safety. A traditional view holds that resources should be directed towards training child pedestrians. In order to reduce socio-economic differentials in child pedestrian casualty rates it is...

UNLABELLED Indications and evidence are limited, multiple and complex for emergency tourniquet use. Good recent outcomes challenge historically poor outcomes. Optimal tourniquet use in trauma care appears to depend on adequate devices, modern doctrine, refined training, speedy evacuation, and performance improvement. Challenges remain in estimation of blood loss volumes, lesion lethality, and c...

The article by Kaplowitz et al in this special issue of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness describes the trauma system response to the wanton suicide shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007.1 The authors are to be congratulated for sharing their experience so quickly, within just 3 months of the event (as of this writing), and in a manner that is consistent with the science of mas...

Many contend that President Bush’s reelection and increased vote share in 2004 prove that the Iraq War was either electorally irrelevant or aided him. We present contrary evidence. Focusing on the change in Bush’s 2004 showing compared to 2000, we discover that Iraq casualties from a state significantly depressed the President’s vote share there. We infer that were it not for the approximately ...

This report describes the initial hospital and burn center management of a mass casualty incident resulting from an aircraft crash and fire. One hundred thirty soldiers were injured, including 10 immediate fatalities. Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, managed the casualties and began receiving patients 15 minutes after the crash. As a result of repetitive training that i...

Emergency medical services (EMS) provide pre-hospital medical care and represent an important part of the rescue chain. The paramedic and physician’s work is characterized by regular day-to-day services as well as extraordinary missions within mass casualty incidents (MCIs). For several reasons, accessing, recording and communicating operational data are important tasks in any scenario of urgen...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To describe the incidence and epidemiology of major incidents occurring in Britain over the past 28 years. METHODS Major incidents were identified through a MEDLINE search, a hand search of journals and government reports at the Home Office Emergency Planning College, newspaper reports, a postal survey of ambulance emergency planning officers, and through requests for informa...

In the past 30 years Denmark has experienced immigration from non-Western countries, but little is known about immigrants' use of health care. The purpose of this study was to compare and quantify the contact patterns with general practice and casualty departments of immigrants of non-Western origin and non-immigrants in Copenhagen City, Denmark. Descriptive register-based study including 2,041...

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND TO THIS PAPER This paper focuses on casualty recording: the attempted comprehensive, systematic and continuous documentation of individual conflict deaths or the incidents in which these occur, as a way of understanding and addressing conflict violence. The paper proposes that there is a broad field of casualty recording, made up of a connected range of different app...

The events of 11 September 2001 became the catalyst for many to shift their disaster preparedness efforts towards mass-casualty incidents. Emergency responders, healthcare workers, emergency managers, and public health officials worldwide are being tasked to improve their readiness by acquiring equipment, providing training and implementing policy, especially in the area of mass-casualty decont...