Correct seat belt use saves children's lives

Nine out of ten children are seriously or fatally injured in traffic accidents because they are incorrectly restrained or because of loose objects in cars. Credit: Marianne Skjerven-Martinsen, NIPH

Nine out of ten children are seriously or fatally injured in traffic accidents because they are incorrectly restrained or because of loose objects in cars. Correct use of safety equipment will save more lives, according to a new study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH).

Why are some children seriously or fatally injured in traffic accidents while other children in the same vehicle walk away without physical injury? This is one of the main questions Dr Marianne Skjerven-Martinsen at the NIPH studied as part of her doctoral dissertation.

The study is part of the research project 'Barn i bil' (Eng: Children in cars), a collaboration between the NIPH and Oslo University Hospital. As part of the project, a roadside study of normal traffic on Norwegian high-speed roads also took place which showed that every third child was incorrectly restrained.

Correct seat belt use is crucial

By investigating traffic accidents in Norway, Skjerven-Martinsen and her colleagues documented that incorrect restraint and loose objects in cars play a significant role in the number of deaths and injuries among children.

The results show that:

• Accidents where children are seriously injured mainly occur on high speed roads, in weekend traffic and most often follow frontal collisions on roads without crash barriers between carriageways.
• More than 9 out of 10 children who were seriously or fatally injured in traffic accidents were incorrectly restrained or were hit by loose objects in the car.
• The most common error is that the seatbelt is misplaced, with the shoulder belt under the arm or behind the back, or the lap belt is placed too high on the abdomen.
• Loose objects also cause damage to passengers, often indirectly when heavy luggage shifts, displacing the rear seat where the child is sitting.
• Correctly secured children have a low risk of injury, even in a heavy collision.

Children over 4 years are injured most frequently and the most common injuries are to the head, face, chest and abdomen.

For younger children, the most common errors are loose or misplaced straps.

Learn from experience

"We see that adults want to protect their children but they may lack knowledge of what can happen if the equipment is not used properly. The aim of this study was to evaluate the incorrect usage of child restraint in the vehicle, related to the child's height, age and type of equipment. In this way, we can give advice to parents, authorities and particularly the motor industry," says Skjerven-Martinsen.

In her thesis, she also described how children of different ages should be secured to prevent serious injury in car accidents. The findings provide a scientific basis for targeted prevention.

Source: Norwegian Institute of Public Health

Camera trap images help wildlife managers ID problem tigers in India

Researchers with WCS and other partners in India are camera traps to ID individual tigers in conflict and relocate them out of harm's way for the benefit of both tigers and people. Credit: WCS

Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society and other partners in India are using high-tech solutions to zero in on individual tigers in conflict and relocate them out of harm's way for the benefit of both tigers and people.

In recent tiger-conflict cases involving both a human fatality and the predation of livestock, both occurring near two of India's national parks, WCS scientists helped to identify problem tigers using stripe pattern-matching software and additional information to make the connections. Both tigers have been captured and relocated to a nearby zoo.

Reducing human-wildlife conflict while promoting human welfare and conservation in important wildlife habitats is one of many topics under discussion of the World Parks Congress, a once-in-a-decade event focusing on the management and expansion of the world's protected area networks and the wildlife they contain. The congress, which took place in Sydney, Australia concluded today.

A new paper titled "Photographic Database Informs Management of Conflict Tigers" appears in the latest version of the journal Oryx. The authors are: Ullas Karanth, N. Samba Kumar, and Divya Vasudev of WCS's India Program.

"The vast majority of tigers generally avoid humans and focus only on natural prey species," said Dr. Ullas Karanth, WCS's Director for Science-Asia and lead author on the paper. 

"Using scientific methods to locate individuals involved in conflict with humans and livestock helps us to mitigate threats to people and prevent the capture of the wrong tigers, especially wherever tigers may venture beyond protected area borders."

While tigers struggle to survive in other landscapes across their range through Asia, the big cats in the Malenad Tiger Landscape of southwest India have thrived, becoming one of the largest tiger populations in the world with an estimated 400 animals.

Part of this conservation success has been due to a WCS research program focused on the identification of individual tigers. The system uses unique stripe patterns to identify and track individual animals, and software programs have greatly improved the speed and accuracy of the process. Since the initiation of the research protocol, more than 750 tigers have been identified from six protected areas in the Malanad Tiger Landscape in the Western Ghats across India. The system also enables researchers to keep track of other data such as home range locations, age and ex of individual animals, activity patterns. Over the longer term it even enables estimation of survival and recruitment rates and changes in numbers, all of which can be used to inform management decisions on wild tigers.

The tiger database has become a key factor in finding and capturing problem tigers. One of the recently captured animals was involved in the loss of human life near Bandipur National Park in late December of 2013. Scientists managed to get pictures of the animal from camera traps set up near the area of conflict and discovered a match with an animal photographed over a 5-year period and probably past its prime. Old tigers unable to catch natural prey animals can sometimes resort to hunting livestock, bringing them in conflict with people.

Another tiger, involved in the killing of cattle in a village next to Nagarahole National Park, was by contrast a 2-3 year old youngster some 35 kilometers from locations in which it was previously photographed. Scientists concluded this young tiger was likely searching for a territory, beyond protected areas.

Once ranging across Asia from Turkey to Indonesia, the tiger has been decimated by a combination of habitat destruction, overhunting of prey animal, poaching for the illegal trade and retaliatory killing by humans. The total wild population has been reduced in numbers from perhaps 100,000 at the turn of the 20th Century to a current estimate of fewer than 3,500 animals remaining in only 6 percent of the species' historic range.

Source: Wildlife Conservation Society