Unexpected Dangers from Drunk Drivers
By Rochelle Caviness
When most people think about a child being killed by a drunk driver, they tend to assume that the driver was in another vehicle. Very few even remotely consider that the child may have been the passenger in the car that the drunk driver was driving.
According to a report in the May 3rd edition of The Journal of the American Medical Association entitled, Alcohol and Motor Vehicle-Related Deaths of Children as Passengers, Pedestrians, and Bicyclists two-thirds of all children killed in drunk driving accidents where passengers in the car being driven by the drunk driver!
Failure to Buckle-Up
The vast majority (82%) of the children killed, while riding in a car with a drunk driver, were not properly buckled-up. This ranges from the children not being restrained at all, to the child being incorrectly restrained.
In general, most children killed in motor vehicle accidents were not properly restrained. According to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report, in 1996, this figure was 55%. This number does not include those children who died that were improperly restrained, such as being placed in a car seat that was not adequately anchored or were used improperly.
Car seats were and are used improperly about 80% of the time. This has initiated new stringent rules, in regard to the Safety Seat Anchorage Systems regulations, which are geared toward making car seats easier to install and more foolproof when it comes to properly restraining a child.
A 'Buckleup' study conducted as part of the National SAFE KIDS Campaign estimated that four out of five car seats are improperly installed or used.
Deadly Cars
According to a 1994 CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), motor vehicle crashes are the number one killer of people between the ages of 1 and 34.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimated that in 1998, an average of seven children between the ages of 0-14 were killed, and 866 were injured, due to motor vehicle accidents - Daily!
Alcohol plays a major role in many motor vehicle accidents. For example, of the approximately 40,000 accidents that occurred in 1993, about 17,500 were alcohol related. To put these figures in a more understandable light - The NHTSA estimates that in the U.S. one person dies in an alcohol related motor vehicle accident every 33 minutes.
According to a 1997 MMWR report, Alcohol-Related Traffic Fatalities Involving Children, between 1985-1996 alcohol was involved in a quarter of all traffic related deaths involving children under the age of 15. Of those children that died, two-thirds were passengers in the car being driven by the drunk driver.
The Centers for Disease Control has noted an overall decline in alcohol related fatalities. Nonetheless, the May 3, 2000 JAMA report showed that the percentage of children dying in alcohol related accidents, in which the driver of their car was drunk, has remained constant.
