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LETTER |
The authors are members of the ICE on Injury Statistics. Lois Fingerhut is with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, Md. James Harrison is with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, National Injury Surveillance Unit, Adelaide, Australia. Yvette Holder is with International Biostatistics and Information Services, Castries, St Lucia. Birthe Frimodt-Møller is with the National Institute of Public Health, Copenhagen, Denmark. Susan Mackenzie is with the Injury and Child Maltreatment Section, Health Canada, Ottawa. Saakje Mulder is with the Consumer Safety Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Ian Scott is with the Injury and Violence Prevention office, WHO, Geneva, Switzerland.
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Lois A. Fingerhut, MA, NCHS/OAE, 3311 Toledo Rd, Room 6316, Hyattsville, MD 20782 (e-mail: lfingerhut{at}cdc.gov).
In "Addressing the Growing Burden of Trauma and Injury in Low- and Middle-Income Countries," Hofman et al. report on a meeting sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).1 The article acknowledges some work by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) but neglects to acknowledge an international activity sponsored by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics and cofunded by NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
The International Collaborative Effort (ICE) on Injury Statistics has been ongoing since 1994.2 Its primary goal is to provide a forum for international exchange and collaboration among injury researchers who develop and promote international standards for injury data collection and analysis. A secondary goal is to produce products of the highest quality to facilitate the comparability and improved quality of injury data. It is this second goal that is particularly relevant.
Epidemiology is listed by Hofman et al. as one of the most critical areas of research: "A broad spectrum of epidemiological and surveillance research is needed to enhance knowledge. . . ."1(p15) Several ICE projects are directly related to this area, including the development of injury indicators and the various reporting frameworks for standardized comparisons of both fatal and nonfatal injury outcomes (see http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/otheract/ice/projects.htm).
A discussion of the International Classification of External Causes of Injury (ICECI) would perhaps have been relevant for the NIH meeting. The ICECI was adopted into the family of classifications by the World Health Organization (WHO) in October 2003. In the 1980s and early 1990s efforts were made to improve upon the International Classification of Diseases classification of external causes of injury for the purposes of injury prevention. Under the auspices of WHO, injury professionals from all over the world worked to develop ICECI, an improved tool for capturing data on the circumstances in which injuries occur. The most recent version is available on the ICECI Web site.3
Countries for which ICECI-based surveillance was reported at the Safety 2004 Conference in Vienna, Austria, include Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia. WHO has also published injury surveillance guidelines (compatible with the ICECI) that are specifically intended for use in settings where resources are scarce.4 The next meeting of the ICE on Injury Statistics will focus on injury statistics in Latin America and will take place in Mexico.
References
1. Hofman K, Primack A, Keusch G, Hrynkow S. Addressing the growing burden of trauma and injury in low- and middle-income countries. Am J Public Health. 2005;95:13–17.
2. Fingerhut LA. International Collaborative Effort on Injury Statistics: 10 year review. Inj Prev. 2004;10: 264–267.
3. International Classification of External Causes of Injury (ICECI). Version 1.2. Available at: http://www.iceci.org. Accessed May 10, 2005.
4. Holder Y, Peden M, Krug E, Lund J, Gururaj G, Kobusingye O, eds. Injury Surveillance Guidelines. 2001. Available at: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/surveillance/surveillance_guidelines/en. Accessed May 10, 2005.
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