A systematic medical recording of each road injury in the departement du Rhone in France has been made since 1 January 1995. General information on the crashes is collected. Specific attention is paid to the description of injuries which are coded according to Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) 90. In 1995, 7,871 crashes (versus 3,521 "officially") and 9,109 casualties (versus 4,817) were reported in the registry. It is clear that the "official" statistics underestimate reality, and these underestimations depend closely on user type and injury severity. However, the authors focus essentially on injury descriptions. Some illustrations of these are proposed. (A)
Abstract