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Objectives: This study examined physicians' perspectives on mandatory reporting of intimate partner violence to police., Methods: We surveyed a stratified random sample of California physicians practicing emergency, family, and internal medicine and obstetrics/gynecology., Results: An estimated 59% of California primary care and emergency physicians (n = 508, 71% response rate) reported that they might not comply with the reporting law if a patient objects. Primary care physicians reported lower compliance. Most physicians agreed that the legislation has potential risks, raises ethical concerns, and may provide benefits., Conclusions: Physicians' stated noncompliance and perceived negative consequences raise the possibility that California's mandatory reporting law is problematic and ineffective.

Project Burn Prevention was designed and implemented to determine the ability of a public education program to increase awareness about burn hazards and reduce the incidence and severity of burn injuries. Media messages were transmitted to residents of a large metropolitan area; separate school and community interventions were implemented in two demographically similar communities within the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA). A second metropolitan area and two of its communities served as control sites. Messages for specific, high-risk age groups emphasized flame burns because of their severity and scalds because of their frequency. Knowledge gains were demonstrable only as a result of the school program. Neither the school program nor the media campaign reduced burn incidence or severity; the community intervention may have brought about a moderate, temporary reduction in injuries. Multiplicity of messages, brevity of the campaign, and separation of the interventions are among possible reasons for the program's failure to significantly reduce burn injuries. Education for personal responsibility is not sufficient. Product modification and environmental redesign must be instituted through education and legislation for successful control of burn injuries.

We measured burn incidence rates for residents of five Massachusetts cities. The data set included all non-occupational burn injuries and cases of smoke inhalation requiring treatment on an inpatient or an outpatient basis in a hospital, occurring between October 1, 1973 and September 30, 1976. Rates of burn injuries by age, and by burn type were calculated for each city. Examination of the data revealed large differences in the magnitude of the age-specific incidence rates among cities but remarkably similar patterns of rates for each city. Differences in the economic status among the cities and among census tracts within the cities appeared to explain a large proportion of the variation in the crude burn rates. A similar specificity of certain types of burn injury by age and sex was common to each city. These findings can be used by health education specialists to design and implement burn prevention programs in these communities appropriate for those individuals at highest risk.

Montgomery County, Maryland was the first major jurisdiction to pass a law requiring smoke detectors in all homes. Smoke detector coverage in the county was evaluated five years after the law's implementation and compared to the coverage in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, which has no such law. Firefighters visited 651 randomly selected owner-occupied homes and tested each detector. While a similar percentage of homes in Montgomery and Fairfax counties complied with detector codes (42 per cent vs 44 per cent, respectively), Montgomery County had a significantly lower percentage of homes with no working detectors (17 per cent vs 30 per cent) and with no detectors at all (6 per cent vs 16 per cent). In general, Montgomery County residents complied with what they believed the law required, but lacked knowledge of the law's details. New homes where building codes required detectors and homes where owners assumed that detectors were required by law were likely to have working detectors. Analyses of 12 years of fire data suggest that as a county approaches complete detector coverage, the risk of residential fire deaths decreases. An essentially unenforced law seems to be obeyed because it conforms to community values.