In September 2003, Mexico City introduced "Conduce sin Alcohol" (CSA)-drive without alcohol-a program that monitors breath alcohol concentration limits among drivers to reduce road traffic crashes. To our knowledge, no study has evaluated the impact of this program on mortality. We estimated the effect of CSA on the monthly rate of traffic-related deaths (deaths per one million people) in Mexico City. We applied interrupted time series analyses (ITSA) using monthly data from 1998 to 2016, adjusting for number of people covered by a public health insurance, monthly number of public health care facilities in the city, monthly average rain precipitation in milliliters, and number of vehicles registered. Our results show a statistically significant average reduction in the monthly trend of traffic-related deaths of 0.08 per 1 million people/per month after the program was implemented relative to the pre-intervention trend. The relative difference comparing pre- and post-intervention predicted values from the ITSA model shows that there was a 23.2% reduction in the fatality rate. Findings from this study can be used to scale up programs to monitor alcohol concentration limits among drivers in cities with high alcohol-related crashes and deaths where the program has not been implemented.
Keywords: Alcohol; Mexico; Programs.