Mark Brandenburg, M.D., is a full-time emergency physician at St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa. The Trauma Emergency Center at St. Francis is the busiest emergency department in Oklahoma, with nearly 70,000 patient visits each year, and serves as the regional trauma center for children. Dr. Brandenburg's commitment to child-injury prevention has been well recognized in the state of Oklahoma and by the American Academy of Emergency Medicine.Webster's dictionary defines an accident as "any event that happens unexpectedly." Child injury is no accident. Most of the injuries that occur to children are very predictable and can be anticipated. So if child injuries are not accidents, what are they? Well, they can be viewed as any other childhood disease. Your infant is at great risk of injury or death if not properly buckled into an automobile safety seat when a motor vehicle accident (MVA) occurs. This is predictable. We know with certainty that over four hundred infants will be killed in MVAs this year, most while unrestrained. By properly placing your infant in a safety seat, her risk of injury will be dramatically decreased. Is it an accident then if an unrestrained child is hurt in a MVA? Would it be considered an accident if a young child developed measles because a vaccination was not given?brbrSo, when four hundred infants are killed in MVAs this year, consider them to have been victims of a disease, the disease of child injury -- or better yet, the epidemic of child injury. The automobile safety seat is a proven preventive measure for this particular disease -- consider it a vaccine.bChild Safe/bis full of proven "vaccines" for the prevention of most child injuries. As Louis Pasteur once said, "When meditating over a disease, I never think of finding a remedy for it but, instead, a means of preventing it." Remember, child injury is not an unexpected event. It is not an accident; it is a disease that everybody can and must work to