Injuries have traditionally been regarded as random, unavoidable “accidents”. Within the last few decades, however, a better understanding of the nature of injuries has changed these old attitudes, and today both unintentional and intentional injuries are viewed as largely preventable events. As a result of this shift in perception, injuries and their health implications have demanded the attention of decision-makers world-wide and injury policy has been firmly placed in the public health arena. Furthermore, the growing acceptance of injuries as a preventable public health problem over the past decade or so has lead to the development of preventative strategies and, consequently, a decrease in the human death toll due to injuries in some countries. Based on the premise that access to accurate, reliable information is the key to sound policy-making, this publication seeks to provide a global overview of the nature and extent of injury mortality and morbidity in the form of user-friendly tables and charts. It is hoped that the graphical representation of the main patterns of the burden of disease due to injury will raise awareness of the importance of injuries as a public health issue and facilitate the implementation of effective prevention programmes. The data presented here are taken from the Global Burden of Disease 2000 database, version 1 (GBD 2000 project). The GBD 2000 project database combines mortality data derived from national vital registration systems with information obtained from surveys, censuses, epidemiological studies and health service data and as such represents the most comprehensive view of global mortality and morbidity available today. The global burden of disease data are disaggregated geographically into six WHO regions, the African Region (AFR), the Region of the Americas (AMR), the South-East Asia Region (SEAR), the European Region (EUR), the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) and the Western Pacific Region (WPR). Countries within each geographical region have been further subdivided by income level, according to the divisions developed by the World Bank. The countries comprising each of the WHO regions and economic grouping within these regions are given in Appendix 1.
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