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Injury Risks For Children Vary Around The World
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According to the WHO report, a factory laborer in a low-income country must work 11 times as long as his counterpart in a high-income country to buy a bicycle helmet. (For a child seat, it's 16 times as long.) That's why injury prevention programs increasingly feature product giveaways paired with education.
At the same time, some countries have risks not widely shared by others.
Death rates from burns are 11 times as high in developing countries as in industrialized ones. But the discrepancy doesn't stop there.
European and American boys and girls have virtually equal rates of death from fire. In South Asia and Southeast Asia, however, girls' mortality is three times that of boys. The explanation, at least in part, is the confluence of three hazards.
Girls assist in family cooking at an early age; the heat source is often an open flame on the ground; and female attire is long and flowing.
Prevention in those societies may need to include changes as simple -- and as difficult -- as getting the stove up to waist height.
-- David Brown
