School Bus Injuries Much More Common Than Thought

New numbers are two to three times higher than previous figures, study finds.

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, November 6, 2006; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2006 ScoutNews LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- The number of American kids injured in nonfatal school bus accidents each year is between double and triple previous estimates, a new study finds.

Among the nation's 23.5 million children and teens under the age of 19 who currently ride school buses, roughly 17,000 head to hospital emergency rooms each year because of injuries sustained either while riding or getting on or off a school bus, the researchers report.

"This number is huge," said study lead author Jennifer McGeehan, a researcher at the Center for Innovation in Pediatric Practice with the Columbus Children's Research Institute at Columbus Children's Hospital in Ohio. "And it means these injuries are occurring much more frequently than previously thought, and parents need to be aware of that."

The study tally far exceeds the 6,000 school bus injuries figure cited by the preeminent nonprofit independent federal advisory group, the Transportation Research Board (TRB). It's also twice as many as the 8,500 injuries cited by the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

In the study, McGeehan and her team reviewed statistics on children under the age of 19 who were injured in a bus-related accident between 2001 and 2003. All of these children were treated at an emergency room in one of 99 hospitals across the U.S.

The information was collected by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission as part of its routine surveillance system, in effect since 1978.

Nonfatal ER-treated bus-related injuries were included if the patient had been riding on a bus, getting on or off a bus, or standing near a bus when they experienced an accident.

The authors point out that, unlike prior TRB efforts looking at injuries during the September-through-June academic term, the current study included injuries sustained over a full 12-month year.

The research team found approximately 51,000 children had been treated during the study period, averaging about 17,000 per year.

Accidents were split almost evenly between boys and girls, and nearly all the patients were treated and released from the hospitals they attended. A little more than 46 percent of the patients were white and about 28 percent were black.