OVERVIEW

The Red Cross defines a disaster as an event causing 10 or more deaths and/or 100 injuries. According to the Red Cross World Disaster Report, transportation-related disasters are a major source of morbidity and mortality, causing 45% of all disaster-related deaths in Africa. During the 1990s, approximately 80,000 people were killed in different disasters in the world each year. This number may be compared with the “low virulent epidemic” of road fatalities that annually kill approximately 1.2 million people (16.1/100,000 inhabitants) and injure 50 million people to such an extent that they require medical attention. In the United States alone, 43,000 are killed annually on the highways.

In commercial aircraft crashes, approximately 1,000 people are killed each year. In sea disasters, the events are more infrequent, but may sometimes engage a few thousand victims each. A few major train incidents are reported annually with sometimes hundreds of fatalities. Bus and coach crashes kill fewer people in each incident than in prior times but apparently are increasing in frequency. A common feature is, however, that many of these incidents occur in rural and remote areas, creating special rescue problems.

In most of these categories, both unintentional and intentional injury events have been reported. More and more frequent suicide attacks have introduced a new dimension of intentional violence, rendering many previous preventive strategies in-effective.