Risk Factors and Magnitude of Human Mortality from Road Traffic Accidents in the North Shewa Zone of the Amhara Regional State in Ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction: Worldwide, road traffic accidents (RTAs) provide serious risks to public health in both developed and developing nations. For young people between the ages of 15 and 29, they are the seventh most common cause of death and the top source of injury. Overspreading, overtaking, poor road conditions, vehicle condition, driver competence, negligence and behavior, and breaking traffic laws and regulations are some of the many variables that contribute to vehicle collisions. Therefore, the aim objective of this study was to estimate human death per road traffic accident and identify its determinant factors in the North Shewa zone of Amhara regional stat of Ethiopia. Methods: A retrospective study was conducted from Insurance Companies in Debre Birehan town from 01 Jan 2018– 31 Dec 2023. All road traffic accident cases from randomly selected districts of the North Shewa zone from 01 Jan 2018– 31 Dec 2023 were included in this study. A total of 894 traffic accident cases were recorded. Data were entered and cleaned using micro soft excels and exported to Stata version 17 for analysis. Zero Inflated Poisson regression was used, and IRR with 95% CI was reported. Results: The results showed that from the 100 traffic accident cases 26 individuals getting death which is a few higher than previous studies. Out of a total of 894 road traffic cases were happened, of whomb156 traffic cases results in 234 human deaths. From 100 road traffic accident cases 26 individuals getting death with 95% CI [21/100, 31/100]. ZIP regression model was selected as the best fitted model to analyze the road traffic data since there was inflation zero outcomes with no over/under dispersion in the data set. Conclusion: Driving experience in years, education level of drivers, driver-vehicle relationship, seat belt use while driving, speed in km/hr, level of driving license, purpose of the vehicle, and pavement roughness are significantly associated with the number of deaths per road traffic accident at the α = 0.05 level of significance. The need for enforcing drivers to obey traffic rules and strong prosecution of speed limits while driving on asphalt roads appear to be the most critical parts of interventions.