Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jul 12, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 15, 2019 - Aug 23, 2019
Date Accepted: Feb 15, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Assessing the Emergent Public Health Concern of All-Terrain Vehicle Injuries in Rural and Agricultural Environments: An Initial Review of Available National Datasets in the U.S.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Injuries related to the operation of off-road vehicles (ORVs), including all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), continue to be a significant public health concern, especially in rural areas and agricultural production. In the United States alone, ATVs have played a role in thousands of fatalities and millions of injuries in recent decades. Yet, no known centralized federal surveillance system consistently captures these data. Traditional injury data sources include surveys, police reports, trauma registries, emergency department data, newspaper and on-line media reports, and state and federal agency databases.
Objective:
Like many other subsectors of injury prevention and injury epidemiology, there is lack of a comprehensive national injury surveillance system for ORV-related injuries, including those from agricultural use of the vehicle. The main purpose of this article is to review existing U.S. datasets for ORV-related injuries.
Methods:
We examined 137 manuscripts retrieved using PubMed queries in relation to their data source. Terms used in various combinations in MeSH and Key Word searches included: “off-road vehicles”, “fatalities”, “accidents”, “wounds”, “injuries”, “ATV”, “UTV”, and “mortality”. Our search yielded 137 results, and 70 were published between 2014 and 2018. From the 70, we selected the articles which used a database in their study (n=17).
Results:
Even sources that included a variety of vehicle and crash-related variables rarely indicated whether the vehicle was used for recreational or occupational purposes. Our review found that these data sources cannot provide a complete picture of the incidents or the circumstantial details needed to effectively inform ORV injury prevention efforts. This is particularly true with regards to ORV injuries related to production agriculture.
Conclusions:
We encourage the establishment of a federally funded national agricultural injury surveillance system. However, in lieu of this, use of multiple data sources will be necessary to piece together a more complete picture of ORV and other agricultural injuries and fatalities.
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