Journal of Applied Science and Technology Vol.7, No.2, December 2010, pp 71-79 ISSN 2218-841X * Corresponding author: E-mail: kamaliubd@yahoo.com (S. M. Mostafa Kamal) Serious Injury and Injurious Burden in Urban Bangladesh S. M. M. Kamal Department of Mathematics, Islamic University, Kushtia-Jhenidah, Bangladesh (Received 15 December 2010; Accepted 30 December 2010) ABSTRACT This paper explores socioeconomic correlates of serious injury and injurious burden among urban people of Bangladesh. The study used information from the nationally representative 2006 Bangladesh Urban Health Survey data. Simple cross tabulation and multivariate statistical analyses were performed to the data set. Overall, 6.8% of the respondents reported to have had experience of serious injury. The most reported cause of serious injury was road accident. More than 37% of the injured people required at least 30 days to be recovered from injury. The incidence of injury was higher among the mid-aged and the older, lower educated and the rural to urban migrants. The poorer, richest, slum dwellers and those who had experience of occupational accident required more times to be recovered from injurious burden. Information, Education and Communication (IEC) programs to create awareness among people may be an effective measure to protect people from serious injury and injurious burden. Keywords: Bangladesh, Injury, Burden, Urban, Logistic regression. INTRODUCTION Worldwide, injury has become a leading cause of death and disability. It has been recognized as a major public health concern in both developed and developing countries. Every year more than 5 million people die due to injuries, accounting for 9% of the world’s death and 12% of the world’s burden of diseases. 1 Millions more are disabled, temporarily or permanently by injury. This situation is even worse in more densely populated countries, like Bangladesh. If injuries cannot be reduced, it will increase in both absolute and relative terms. For instance, road traffic injuries alone are projected to rise from 2.2% in 2004 to 3.6% in 2030 and would rank fifth place from the ninth of all deaths. 2 Studies reveal that injury rates ranging from 46/1000 persons/year (aged ≥ 5 years) in Pakistan 3 , 76/1000 persons/year in rural Vietnam 4 , 116/1000 persons/years in Uganda 5 and 311/1000 persons/years in Bangladesh 6 . Low and middle- income countries (LMICs) are disproportionately affected by injury. Although hospital based studies from developing countries presumably provide a partial but reliable picture of the prevalence and incidence of serious injury, those are not likely to be the total incidence that generally occur per annum. In contrast, population-based studies on injury are costly and rarely carried out due to the fact that the issue has not been yet a public health agenda in developing countries. 7 The vast majority (90%) of all injury related deaths occur in LMICs. 1,4,8-10 Globally, injury mortality rates are 90 deaths per 100,000 persons per year. However, in LMICs the rates are higher at 97 deaths per 100,000 persons per year, which is considerably higher than the rate of 52 deaths per 100,000 per year in high-income countries (HICs). That is, rates of death from injury are almost twice as high in LMICs as compared to the HICs. In addition, there is an enormous burden of temporary and permanent disability from non-fatal injuries. An estimates show that every year about 50,000,000 non- fatal injuries occur only for road traffic injuries, with many more from other types of injuries 2 . In addition to deaths and disabilities, there is significant economic loss for treatment as well as productivity. These costs are especially severe as many of those injuries occur among adults of working age. In LMICs, the economic cost of road traffic injuries alone has been estimated to be nearly US$100 billion, which is twice the sum of all development assistance. 2 Most of the countries lose 1%-2% of their GDP in injury related consequences from road traffic crashes. For example, the percentages of GDP loss from road traffic injuries in the countries accounted 1.6% in Bangladesh, Uganda 2.3%, USA 2.3%, 11 HICs (excluding USA) 1.4%, and Malawi 5%. In China, it has been estimated that road traffic injuries cost $12.5 billion, which is four times of the total public health budget. In countries where economic costs have been assessed, injuries and lost productivity due to interpersonal violence and suicide accounted a very similar proportion of lost GDP 2 . The recognition of the seriousness of road accident problem by the government of Bangladesh is reflected by various measures taken to combat the alarming situation. The National Road Safety Council (NRSC) was established in 1995, which drew up National Road Safety “Strategic Action Plan” covering the period from July 1997 to June 1999 and subsequently a revised three-year action plan (2002- 2004) was prepared. Currently there are two core organizations responsible for preparing national policy on road safety and ensuring its implementation. These are National Road Safety Council (NRSC) and Road Safety Cell (RSC). The NRSC acts as apex body for approving and driving forward the national policy and plans. Besides