ABSTRACT
Only a systematir measurement of the burden that injury imposes on our society helps us fully understand the critical need to cure this pervasive killer and crippler (Rice et al., 1989). Cost is the Rosetta stone that makes burden estimates understandable. Cost estimates offers a major advantage over the measurement of incidence by reducing disparate outcomes-traumatic deaths, broken noses, burns, dog bites, even damaged motorcycles-to a single compact metric. Compactness eases comprehension. That makes cost data valuable for problem size and risk assessment, broad priority-setting, resource allocation modelling, health and safety advocacy, regulatory analysis, performance comparison, and programme evaluation. Cost data describe how injuries affect society and drive analyses of the potential to reduce injuries cost effectively.
