The urgency of establishing a rapid monitoring system for mortality due to traffic accidents (as well as for all mortality due to violence and accidents).

The data regarding the number of deaths from road accidents per year in Italy is presently available only after extensive time, in the range of years. This situation originates from problems related to data collection as well as to the subsequent management of the information. The two sources which allow the quantification of this mortality are: statistic of "Road Accidents documented by the Police Force", consisting in accidents reported by the Police and involving deceased or injured victims; general mortality statistics The first source presents problems related to quality and completeness; the second, problems related to dimensions: reports of mortality due to traffic accidents (presently about 6000 reports per year) end up, as they should, in the flow of general mortality (more than 560,000 reports per year), which necessarily lengthens response time. This excessive time interval between notification of deaths from traffic accidents and their actual availability in terms of statistics has, as of today, a negative impact not only on the prompt knowledge of the phenomenon, but also on the necessary appraisal in light of reaching the objectives proposed by the European Union by 2010 (reduction of 50% health consequences of traffic accidents). This article aims to show that it would be easy to set up a Rapid Monitoring System for deaths due to traffic accidents by creating an appropriate sub-flow of the general mortality statistics. Based on reported appraisals, we aim to show that it seems highly practicable (and convenient) to extend this system to all accidental and violent mortality, inclusive of drug-related mortality (presently underestimated). The authors feel that the System herein described could, in a matter of months, provide, at very low costs, useful and reliable information regarding health and social issues. It is worthwhile pointing out that what hereby proposed does not interfere in any way with the flow of general mortality currently in use and may also be used for parallel collection of data which is currently not being recorded.

Road safety and the tsunami of cell phones.

In the last years an extremely rapid massive diffusion of the cell phones is occurred. Currently in Italy, as in many other countries, almost all the youngsters and a lot of adults possess a cell phones. This device is enormously useful, but its use can determine negative effects on the user's attention, i.e. during vehicle driving. Numerous epidemiological studies show that cell phone use in driving determines a relative risk of causing a road accident around 4 (equivalent to driving with 0.8 g/l blood alcohol concentration), for both hands-held and hands-free devices. This risk doesn't seem well perceived from the Italian drivers: as our surveys show, the 2.5% of them use a cellular hands-held while driving. This situation appears to evolve toward more critical conditions, given the quick diffusion of ever more technologically advanced instruments, such as video-cell phones, mostly capable of capturing the attention, or TV-cell phones, with which the distracting occasions could be more frequent and prolonged. The use of the cell phone seems to imply an important risk for pedestrians: the first results of the monitoring results that we are producing on this matter in Rome show that the 5.5% of the pedestrians cross the road while talking with a hands-held cell phones, in the most of cases ignoring the traffic conditions at all. All this facts show the urgency to promote specific actions of prevention, in absence of which it is reasonable to foresee a consistent growth in the number of road traffic accidents. In our opinion it is necessary to capillarily inform the public of the signalled risks, possibly also in the advertising spaces of the producers and managers of the cellular telephony, apart obvious repressive actions on the use of the cell phones during the guide of a vehicle.