Originally published October 14 2005
New car safety technologies don't protect children
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers found that most new car safety implements favor the driver, not backseat occupants.
Oct. 12, 2005 (Washington) -- Those flashy new cars may have improved on safety for the parents in the front seat, but fewer improvements have been made for the child who may be sitting in the back seat, researchers report.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that in the U.S. during 2002, there were 44,065 deaths due to motor vehicle crashes and that crashes were the leading cause of death for ages 3 to 33 years.
New safety features such as crumple zones, collapsible steering columns, new seat belts, and airbags have been installed.
But University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers have found that those safety measures implemented in newer cars favored the driver rather than those in the backseat.
"It is five times more common for the child to do worse than the driver in crashes in new models of cars than older," says Flaura K. Winston, MD, PhD, director of TraumaLink, an injury research center in Philadelphia.
Winston is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Crash Patterns The researchers looked at "discordant injury."
It's a crash pattern in which the child alone is injured and the driver is favored, or the driver alone is injured and the child is favored.
Excess child-risk crashes were defined as those crashes in which the child passenger was injured but the driver was not.
Nonexcess child-risk crashes were defined as crashes in which both the driver and child passenger were injured or crashes in which the driver but not the child passenger was injured.
Child Safety vs. Adult Safety The researchers teamed up with State Farm Insurance to study how and why children are injured in crashes.
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