Est-ce qu'on pourrait affrimer gratuitement Que les Fran�ais n'ont pas la solution � un probl�me qu'il n'ont pas n! ?))))))
Charles Brault 12 aout 2002-08-12 New-York Times Medical Gains Reduce Deaths From Assaults By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SPRINGFIELD, Mass., Aug. 11 (AP) � Improvements in emergency care over the last 40 years have helped to lower the death rate among assault victims by nearly 70 percent, a new study says. "People who would have ended up in morgues 20 years ago are now simply treated and released by a hospital, often in a matter of a few days," said Anthony R. Harris, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who led the study, published in the journal Homicide Studies. Researchers from Harvard Medical School also took part in the report, which looked at crime data from 1960 to 1999. Deaths from criminal assaults dropped almost 70 percent over the 40 years, with annual declines of 2.5 percent for firearm and knife assaults and 3.5 percent to 4 percent for other assaults, including poisoning and arson, the researchers found. In 1960, the police nationwide recorded 9,110 homicides and 154,320 aggravated assaults. That translated into 5.1 homicides per 100,000 people and 86.1 assaults per 100,000. The researchers found 5.6 percent of those assaults ended in death. In contrast, in 1999 the police recorded 15,522 homicides, a rate of 5.7 per 100,000, and 911,740 aggravated assaults, a rate of 334 per 100,000. But only 1.67 percent of the 1999 assaults ended in death. The researchers noted that there was a slight increase in deaths from assaults in 2000 and 2001 and said they were studying it. Their study credited a variety of medical advancements for the improved death rate, including the development of 911 services, rapid stabilization and transportation of trauma victims, better training for emergency medical technicians, and more hospitals and trauma centers, particularly in rural areas. Without the medical advances, the researchers calculated, 45,000 to 70,000 homicides would have been recorded annually nationwide. The results are consistent with common sense, said Dr. Stephen R. Thomas of the Harvard Medical School, a specialist in emergency medicine who worked on the study. Advances in trauma care since the Vietnam War have increased survival rates for a wide array of injuries, Dr. Thomas said. He said that the study could raise questions about how crime statistics are analyzed, and that researchers should consider whether medical care has improved when assessing local changes in crime rates. xxxxxxxxxx The following appeared in the New York Times Magazine on December 15th. A very interesting slant on the impact of improved EMS systems: The Ambulance - Homicide Theory For all the theoretical talk of "broken windows" and "zero tolerance" policing that has dominated the public discourse on crime during the past decade, research published this year suggests that the most significant factor in keeping the homicide rate down is something much more practical: faster ambulances and better care in the emergency room. That, in any case, is the intellectual hand grenade that Anthony Harris, director of the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has thrown into the polarized debate over crime prevention. Harris stumbled upon this simple idea after years of trying to figure out why the aggravated-assault rate skyrocketed by several hundred percent over the past four decades, while the murder rate has remained flat, never increasing or decreasing by more than 50 percent. He had his breakthrough a couple of years ago, while watching an emergency-room reality TV show that featured the story of a man stabbed in the head with a huge knife. Despite horrendous injuries, E.R. doctors saved the man's life. Instead of a homicide, the patient became an aggravated-assault victim, and Harris realized he had the explanation he had been looking for. "It was an epiphany," he says. In "Murder and Medicine," a paper published in May in the journal Homicide Studies, Harris and three other researchers determined that the murder rate is being artificially suppressed because thousands of potential homicide victims each year are not receiving swift medical attention and surviving. Americans, in other words, aren't any less murderous - it's just getting harder for us to kill one another. Our modern 911 dispatchers, E.M.S. Technicians, trauma-care units and emergency-room surgeons have been saving patients who were on the cusp of becoming murder statistics and moving them into the aggravated-assault column. Between 1960 and 1999, the proportion of criminal assaults ending in death - what Harris calls "the lethality rate" - dropped by 70 percent. (The steepest decline came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when advances in battlefield surgery led to innovations in civilian emergency care.) In fact, Harris estimates that there would be 30,000 to 50,000 additional murders in the U.S. each year - doubling or tripling the current rate - without our current level of emergency care technology. If he's right, the focus by criminologists on the stable or declining murder rate is actually masking a radical increase of violence in America, a fact that has unexpected consequences. For example, communities without access to the most advanced emergency medical services may have higher homicide rates. "How much is the black-offender rate inflated?" Harris asks. And there are strange implications for the criminal-justice system. An attempted murderer carrying out his crime in an area with poor emergency services is more likely to succeed than one operating near a high-tech trauma center. The former may be executed, while the latter spends just a few years in prison, their punishments determined not by any disparity in lethal intent, but by the unequal levels of local medical care. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com --- URG-L Pour modifier votre adresse de courriel sur URG-L, envoyez un avis a [EMAIL PROTECTED] en indiquant votre nouvelle adresse ainsi que l'ancienne et le nom de la liste.
