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Paper Title:
A case-control study
of the effect of alcohol on the risk of driver fatal injury in New
Zealand
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Authors:
Michael D. Keall, William
J. Frith, Tui L. Patterson
Abstract:
This study presents estimates
of the effect of alcohol on the risk of driver fatal injury in a
crash in New Zealand for the years 1995 to 2000. Such estimates
have not been attempted before in New Zealand; instead, estimates
from overseas studies have been assumed to apply. However, New Zealand
differs in terms of the quality of the road network and has a unique
mixture of cultures with attitudes and reactions to alcohol that
may differ from other countries. The risk estimates presented in
this paper are derived from a case-control study where the cases
were fatally injured drivers from crashes that occurred on Friday
and Saturday nights and the controls were drivers stopped at the
roadside and breath-tested, also on Friday and Saturday nights (the
main drinking days and times in New Zealand). The results are presented
both as conventional relative risk ratios, where driver risk of
fatal injury at each available BAC level is estimated relative to
the risk at zero BAC, and as estimates derived from a log-linear
model fitted to the data. In both cases, estimated risk increases
steeply with increasing BAC and is highly significantly greater
than the risk at zero BAC by the time the driver is at a BAC of
50mg/dl. Also discussed are: the impacts of various theoretical
legal alcohol limits on driver fatal injury; the influence of alcohol
on the driver’s survivability following physical trauma; and
laboratory-based research that identifies significant performance
decrements at relatively low alcohol levels.
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