Traffic safety measures ranging from seat belt and drunk driving enforcement to design standards for cars and trucks “averted a public health disaster” by preventing about 5.8 million deaths in the U.S. from 1968 through 2015, according to a new study.

The analysis found that without federal and state policies, traffic deaths annually would “likely have been in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens of thousands” in recent years. The report, published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, was by Leon Robertson, an injury epidemiology expert who taught at Yale and Harvard and has written more than 150 research papers and books, many on automotive safety. . .

Read more here: Researcher Says Auto Safety Measures Prevented Millions of Deaths, FairWarning, Christopher Jensen, March 12, 2018

I am thankful for every life saved from the fate of a motor vehicle fatality. However, there are still thousands of lives lost every year to preventable traffic deaths. And this most certainly includes the hundreds (and maybe thousands) of lives lost to Death By Truck Underride, which has been woefully neglected for decades by those who could have done something about it and which negates the safety features of modern cars.

In my book, this is still a major public health problem. And we need to start acting like it is!

Last night, Pres. Obama referred in the past tense to crash fatalities as a public health problem.