Injury Prevention and Environmental Health: Key Messages from Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition

Excerpt

Injury Prevention and Environmental Health identifies essential prevention strategies and related policies that address substantial population health needs and that are cost-effective and feasible to implement. This volume addresses diverse conditions that arise from exposure to outside forces, such as chemicals and toxins, kinetic energy, or thermal energy. These conditions require similar policy approaches to reducing risk and mandate involvement of multiple sectors. Included in this group of conditions are injuries attributable to unintentional mechanisms (road traffic crashes, falls, burns, and drowning); injuries attributable to intentional mechanisms (interpersonal violence); disorders caused by or aggravated by exposure to airborne toxins (air pollution); occupational issues (injuries and disorders caused by or aggravated by toxins in the workplace); and waterborne infectious diseases. This volume focuses exclusively on interventions to prevent these conditions. Treatment for health conditions resulting from injury and environmental risk factors is covered in other volumes of the third edition of Disease Control Priorities (DCP3), as are immunizations and prevention of suicide (Black, Laxminarayan, and others 2016; Black, Levin, and others 2016; Bundy and others 2017; Debas and others 2015; Mock and others 2015; Patel and others 2015; Patel and others 2016; Prabhakaran and others 2017).

In this review, we identify several key messages. First, there is a large health burden from injury, occupational risk factors, air pollution, unclean water, and poor sanitation. These conditions are major global health problems to which inadequate attention has been directed. Second, these disorders and the risk factors that cause them have predictable patterns across stages of national development. Understanding these patterns can assist with the planning of prevention efforts. Third, cost-effective and cost-beneficial interventions that can address these conditions already exist and are in established use in most high-income countries (HICs). In most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), these interventions have been implemented only to a modest extent or not at all. On the basis of these interventions’ cost-effectiveness and their potential to lower the disease burden, we propose a package of policy interventions (box 1.1).