EDITOR, - In their article assessing the preventability of deaths from injuries, L M Hussain and A D Redmond present convincing evidence that some accident victims are dying because of ignorance about basic airway management at the scene.1 However, their assessment that death was preventable in at least 39% of those who died from accidental injury before they reached hospital is tenuous.

Their assessment is based principally on the fact that 46 of 152 patients who died before reaching hospital had an estimated survival probability greater than 50%. The probability estimates for the survival of these patients were based not only on calculations on data that are over 30 years old, as the authors state, but also on Bull's data, which were collected only for deaths in hospital.2 Bull explicitly excluded pre- hospital deaths from …