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Objective: To evaluate the child passenger safety, curriculum of the Junglemobile, a traveling injury prevention program for young children. Design: Cross-sectional evaluation with self-controls, convenience sample. Setting: School and community events in rural Colorado, Wyoming, and western Nebraska where the Junglemobile participated for the years 2000-2003. Participants: Children 11 years of age or younger attending a Junglemobile event. Intervention: Children were tested on the Junglemobile child passenger safety, curriculum. Children 3 to 6 years of age (Group 1) completed a pretest and a posttest. Children 7 to 11 years of age (Group 2) completed a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a 30-day posttest. Results: Two hundred thirty-seven children in Group 1 completed the pretest, 76% completed both tests. In Group 2, 420 children took the pretest, 55% took all the 3 tests. Group 1 showed significant improvement in the ability to demonstrate the appropriate place to ride in a car, t (179) = -4.06, P < .001. In Group 2, 61% reported always being restrained on the pretest and 73.2% on the 30-day posttest, t(230) = -3.85, P < .001; 85.7% reported being restrained the last time they rode in a car or truck on the pretest; and 93.5% on the 30-day posttest t(228) = -3.38, P < .001. Reported booster seat use increased on 30-day posttest and was greater when parents received an educational brochure (increased approximately 5% without brochure vs 25% with brochure). Conclusions: Children can be taught about child passenger safety through the Junglemobile, a simple educational strategy. Parental education significantly modifies booster seat use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses training for traffic safety in colleges and universities of the United States. People in the U.S. are paying an enormous price for accidents, when by investing in safety huge sums of money and tens of thousands of lives could have been saved. The best hope of reversing this bad bargain is through the development of trained leadership. The job clearly falls on colleges and universities, for by and large this training is a public responsibility, and only institutions of higher learning can provide the facilities for the technical and professional instruction involved. In 1950 alone, accidents cost 7.3 billions of dollars. If nothing else, the fact that this amount just about equals the estimated cost of all education in the U.S. in the 1949-1950 school year is a startling commentary on people's collective carelessness. But much more important, these same accidents also cost 90000 lives and some 9 million injuries with the 1951 toll expected to be even greater. Traffic accidents alone account for more than a third of the annual toll, with the 1951 loss expected to exceed 37500 lives, a million and a half personal injuries, (with perhaps 150000 permanently disabled) and some three and a half billion dollars in economic loss.

The article focuses on recommendations for teacher education institutions regarding safety education. During the 1950 academic year, safety education, in one form or another, was offered by only slightly more than half of the 335 educational institutions in the United States engaged in preparing teachers. Of the 294 courses listed, close to one-half were in driver education, slightly fewer in some phase of general safety education, and 10 in athletics and recreation. Additional short-course offerings included 75 driver education institutes and 12 seminars for college instructors. Some of the recommendations that have been discussed are related to: the continuance of institutes, conferences, work-shops and short courses in safety education and driver education for administrators and teachers; an increase in research activities on the part of both institutions of higher learning and other public and private agencies; and the development of more well-integrated programs of safety education on the college level.

The article focuses on the progress of safety education in high schools of the United States. Since 1922, when organized efforts for child safety began, the accident death rate in the 5-14 age group has decreased 45 per cent. Accidents in the 15-19 age group have increased 6 per cent during the same period. Safety education has been much more widely accepted in elementary schools than in secondary. According to the Fourth Annual Driver Education Award Program of the Association of Casualty and Surety Companies, during the academic year 1950-1951, the number of high school students receiving instruction in driver education reached 662000, an 18 percent increase over the previous year.

The article presents information on conferences and meetings related to safety and safety education that were held in the United States. The problem of safety has been so closely associated with the conservation of manpower and the reduction of property losses that it has been found necessary to call several important national conferences. This was especially true during World War II. The losses from accidents were so serious that they became a threat to the United States economy. The conferences that have been listed are: 1946 President's Highway Safety Conference; 1947 Follow-up Conference; 1947 President's Conference on Fire Prevention; 1948 President's Conference on Industrial Safety; 1948 National Conference on School Bus Transportation. Safety education had an important place in all of these conferences. In several cases, as in the conferences on Highway Safety, Industrial Safety, and Fire Prevention, four or five committees on various phases of education submitted reports, digests of which were published by the conferences.