Advanced Driving... and a school in Africa

[theyoungen]

Being an insomniac student, I'm currently sitting (at 2:30AM) watching News 24.

I've just watched an item about Oprah Winfrey donating $40M to fund a new girls' school in South Africa which has received a lot of coverage on the news both here and in the US (and undoubtedly elsewhere).

"What's this got to do with Advanced Driving?" I hear you ask!! Well, she cited as one of her reasons for setting up the school that "AIDS is a pandemic in this country [S.A.]. Girls who are educated are less likely to get AIDS. We need to do something now to reverse this pandemic by educating these children".

[I may have misquoted exact language, but it's near enough spot on]

The parallel between the pandemic of AIDS in South Africa and what could be described as a pandemic of road deaths in the UK stood out to me.

Now there are of course important differences and I'm not attempting to belittle what is clearly a humanitarian disaster in Africa, but it seems ironic to me that, as Oprah pointed out, the pandemic in South Africa can be reversed though education and SO CAN OURS!! ...yet still, no one [high profile] has stood up and shouted about it!!

Who is our Oprah?!

Excuse my mid-night ruminations... just thought I ought to vent them somewhere!

[Gareth]

The parallel between the pandemic of AIDS in South Africa and what could be described as a pandemic of road deaths in the UK stood out to me.

I'm not sure that the rate of road deaths in the UK can really be described as pandemic. However and as you say, it ought to be possible to reduce the number of deaths through improved or additional education, but at some point it must become a case of diminishing returns, and the argument against improved education already is often one of cost and the availablilty of resources.

Perhaps a good starting point is to ask what is an acceptable rate of attrition on the roads. To answer this we need to have a good understanding of the extent of mobility within our society, the risks of various kinds of activities that can results in road related injury or death, and what sub-groupings can be realistically targeted and justifiably so from a cost effectiveness point of view.

People often react with horror when told there are over 3000 road related deaths per year, but how do they feel about being told there are over 5000 hospital deaths each year resulting from infections caught after the patients began their stay in the hospitals.

From Medical News Today of a couple of years ago:

The official government statistics suggest that there are around 5,000 deaths each year. However, campaigners claim that these figures are outdated and that the real number is closer to 20,000.

It is believed that nearly 50 per cent of deaths could be due to the methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus bacteria - the so-called super-bug MRSA.

Tony Field, a member of the MRSA support group, said: "The situation is far worse even than this figure because doctors are not obliged to mention MRSA on a death certificate as a secondary cause of death. There's a lot of unreporting."

Then consider this from a report in the Guardian newspaper last December:

The bacterium spreads easily through unhygienic wards.

Cases rose by more than 17% last year in England - with 51,690 people aged 65 and over contracting it. Experts now view it as far more deadly than MRSA.

I don't know what the real figures are for MRSA and other diseases are - it's hard to find accurate figures - but I'd prefer that they were tackled at a higher priority than road deaths and that a person could go into hospital with a high degree of confidence that the necessary hygiene safeguards were in place so that the chance of acquiring a potentially lethal disease was extremely small.

[SbT]

[quote="Gareth"]


...but I'd prefer that they were tackled at a higher priority than road deaths..

The two are not mutually exclusive though.

SbT