BUMC PROCEEDINGS 2001;14:150–153 The November 1999 Institute of Medicine report on medical errors has captured the attention of the public and of lawmakers. That report provided evidence that health care institutions can be pretty hazardous: from 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year are related to medical errors, compared with about 42,000 deaths per year for automobile accidents, about 5000 deaths...

BACKGROUND Chronic health conditions associated with ageing can lead to changes in driving ability. The Canadian Driving Research Initiative for Vehicular Safety in the Elderly (Candrive II) is a 5-year prospective study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research aiming to develop an in-office screening tool that will help clinicians identify potentially at-risk older drivers. Current...

Railroad-related accidents are more dangerous than other transportation accidents in terms of severity and death rate etc. Therefore more efforts are necessary for improving safety. In the mean time, Korean national railroad has researched and invested continuously such as intelligent safety equipments and level crossing between railroad and highway for decreasing railroad-related accident and ...

"Unintended-acceleration" automobile accidents typically begin when the driver first enters the car, starts the engine, and intends to press his/her right foot on the brake while shifting from Park to a drive gear (Drive or Reverse). The driver reports an unintended (uncommanded) full-throttle acceleration, coupled with a loss of braking, until the episode ends in a crash. Pedal misapplications...

A retrospective study was performed to assess facial fractures in patients treated at a public hospital in Belo Horizonte, in 2000. The data collected included age, gender, etiology, distribution of maxillofacial trauma considering day of the week and month, anatomic site of the fracture, and treatment. The analyses involved descriptive statistics and chi-squared test, Bonferroni test and analy...

Each year, many preventable highway automobile accidents involving single vehicles are caused by inattention and distraction. These accidents are classified as single vehicle road departures. Lane departure and curve negotiation warning systems are an emerging technology to help prevent these types of accidents. I plan to build a road departure warning system that learns individual driver behav...

Guido Calabresi’s book, THE COSTS OF ACCIDENTS, gives two contrasting examples which together prove that efficient decisions about car safety devices must be guided by individual costs. Part I of this essay reviews Calabresi’s demonstration that, if charged accurate insurance costs, Taney would invest in improved brakes and Marshall would not. To show why this demonstration fails to inform deba...

The ability of an automobile tyre to ‘grip’ the road and avoid skidding is ultimately dependent upon the events in the tyre-road interface. This seems obvious, and yet some 70 years after pneumatic rubber tyres were first put to use we are not able to explain fully the frictional processes between the tyre and the road. Over 650 papers have been published prior to 1970 on some aspect of tyre be...