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Notice to Readers: Buckle Up America Week, May 20--27, 2002
May 20--27, 2002, is Buckle Up America Week. Sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA), this is a national campaign to promote safety-belt and child safety seat use. The focus of this year's campaign is
to increase safety-belt use among teenagers.
In 1999, motor-vehicle crashes accounted for 38% of all deaths for persons aged 15--19 years
(1). In 2000, an estimated 5,648 teenagers died in motor-vehicle crashes. Among the passengers killed, 63% were riding with a teenaged driver.
Of teenagers killed as drivers or passengers, one third were wearing safety belts
(2). Teenagers have the lowest safety-belt
use among all age groups (50%), compared with a national estimate of 73% among all ages. Greater safety-belt use
among teenagers would substantially decrease unintentional death and injuries in the United States.
Buckle Up America Week involves a wide range of efforts to promote safety-belt use among all persons in the United
States to achieve NHTSA's goal of 90% safety-belt use by 2005
(3) and the national health objective for 2010 of 92%
safety-belt use (4). Safety-belt laws and enhanced law enforcement are among the most effective means for increasing widespread
safety-belt use (5). The combination of education and public awareness targeted to those most at risk and high-visibility
law enforcement provides the greatest opportunity to make immediate gains in safety-belt use that can be sustained over
time. These strategies were endorsed and recommended by the Task Force on Community Preventive Services to reduce injuries
to
motor-vehicle occupants (6). Additional information on child passenger safety and Buckle Up America activities is available
at http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov and http://www.buckleupamerica.org, or telephone 888-327-4236.
References
CDC. WONDER. Atlanta, Georgia: CDC, National Center for Health Statistics, 1999. Available at
http://www.cdc.gov/wonder.
U.S. Department of Transportation. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Fatality analysis reporting system 2000. Available at
http://www.fars.nhsta.dot.gov/queryreport.cfm.
U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Presidential initiative for increasing seat belt use
nationwide: recommendations from the Secretary of Transportation. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration, 1997 (Publication no. DOT-HS 808-576).
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Healthy People 2010 (conference ed., 2 vols). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services, 2000.
Dinh-Zarr TB, Sleet DA, Shults RA, et al, and the Task Force on Community Preventive Services. Reviews of evidence regarding interventions
to increase the use of safety belts. Am J Prev Med 2001;21:48--65.
Use of trade names and commercial sources is for identification only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services.References to non-CDC sites on the Internet are
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endorsement of these organizations or their programs by CDC or the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. CDC is not responsible for the content
of pages found at these sites. URL addresses listed in MMWR were current as of
the date of publication.
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