One of the biggest contributors to climate change are gasoline-powered vehicles, which emit greenhouse gases that warm Earth’s atmosphere. In a positive step, our nation is shifting toward climate-friendly electric vehicles (EVs), which emit less greenhouse gasses than gasoline-powered cars, even when accounting for manufacturing and the electricity used for charging. But a new survey by Axios reveals disparities in EV accessibility, especially in the Latino population. How might these disparities impact Latino health and our nation’s fight against climate change?
How Do Latinos Feel About EVs?
According to the Axios survey, most Latinos (60%) say it’s important to shift to EVs to minimize climate change damage, but they expressed more interest in buying gas-powered ...
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is proposing to consider pedestrians in their vehicle safety rating system. That is good news for a system that has ignored the safety of people outside the vehicle wherein "pedestrian fatalities have skyrocketed 77% since 2010, compared to 25% for all other traffic-related deaths," according to preliminary data from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). But the news isn’t all good. NHTSA’s proposed changes to the vehicle safety rating system – the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) – are insufficient. The changes do not differentiate between pedestrian injury risk and fatality risk, and they fail to fully inform consumers about the true risk to pedestrians from vehicles, lessening the potential ...
We have updated our Salud America! Health Equity Report Card to cover your county’s child opportunity score, environmental justice score, location affordability, and transit access. The Health Equity Report Card, first launched in 2017, auto-generates Latino-focused and local data with interactive maps and comparative gauges, which can help you visualize and explore local inequities in housing, transit, poverty, health care, food, education, and more. You will see how your county stacks up in these health equity issues — now including child opportunity, location affordability, and transit access — compared to your state and the nation. Then you can share the Report Card with your local leaders to shift from individualist thinking to advocating for systemic community change ...
Data can drive action for healthy change. But what if we don’t have enough data? Or the right data? Or equitable data? Unfortunately, even with more health reports and more health dashboards than ever before, we still face inconsistent and incomplete data. We are lacking sufficient data – especially data disaggregated by race/ethnicity – on social determinants of health, firearm violence, traffic crashes, and adverse childhood experiences. Insufficient data happens for many reasons. Limited funding, limited staff, uncertain methods, logistical challenges, entrenched practices, inadequate analysis, and inadequate or non-uniform reporting after data collection are occurring at the local, state, and federal levels. Let’s explore the most critical missing data and how ...
For too long, the blame for our nation’s high traffic fatality rate has fallen on individual drivers and factors, rather than on environmental and systemic traffic safety factors. One of the contributors to and consequences of this approach is insufficient crash data. Insufficient crash data hinders efforts to define and monitor the problem and identify risk and protective factors, and thwarts strategies to prevent these unnatural and gruesome deaths. Now is your opportunity to urge federal leaders to collect better crash data to guide traffic safety. Public comments are wanted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on revisions to the Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria (MMUCC), a voluntary guideline of standardized crash data variables for state and ...
More Americans died in motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2021 than any other year since 2005, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). These are violent and tragic deaths. The roughly 2,700,000 injuries from non-fatal crashes are also violent and tragic with individuals often sustaining multiple traumatic injuries, injuries that significantly reduce their quality of life. These violent deaths and injuries are preventable. However, despite past efforts to reduce violent deaths and injuries on American roads, auto-centric guidance and policies and the growing size of automobiles undermine safety efforts today. It’s time to take meaningful action to prevention violent deaths and injuries on our roads. Let’s use #SaludTues on January 10, 2023, ...
The U.S. has a violent child death problem. Developing strategies to prevent violent child death from firearms and traffic crashes is a demanding task that requires consideration of numerous upstream, interrelated, and tangential issues. To help safety advocates develop strategies to prevent violent child death, we compiled five frameworks to help: Understand and explain how proposed strategies will prevent violent child death
Layer multiple strategies to cover shortcomings in strategies
Prioritize upstream primary prevention strategies to improve outcomes for entire populations
Consider the level of intrusiveness of strategies
Apply racial equity tools to ensure equitable adoption/implementation of strategies The five frameworks include: Logic Model/Theory ...
Gun violence and traffic crashes may seem like unpredictable events. But they are not random. They are systematic. Data reveal trends and patterns in gun violence and traffic crashes that can help us identify risk factors and protective factors. This is especially important for addressing violent child deaths. So what do the data show? Join Salud America! as we explore data on risk factors as part of our four-part series on violent child death. Read the Series Overview and Part 1.
Nothing is as Random as You Think
Very little is random when it comes to our health and length of life. Rather, trends in health outcomes point to various individual, social, and environmental factors that either contribute to or safeguard against health-related problems. Although often not ...
Thanks to vaccinations, antibiotics, and medical treatment, death from infectious disease has declined drastically among children in high-income countries. But violent death is a serious threat to children in the United States. Here, guns and traffic crashes are the top killers of youth aged 1-19. Worse, these violent child deaths have increased in recent years. We can’t explain away all traffic crashes on individual behavior. We also can’t explain away all firearm incidents on individual behavior. These are systemic problems that require systemic solutions. Salud America! is exploring the scope of violent child death as part of its four-part series on public health approaches to addressing child deaths from guns and traffic crashes.
The State of Child Traffic ...
