HEALTH: Danger on the Roads of the South

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Aug 27 2002 (IPS) - Traffic accidents cause more than a million deaths and tens of millions of injuries around the world each year, but most occur in developing countries, says a new report by the Global Forum for Health Research.

The victims of road accidents are overwhelmingly members of the poorest sectors of the population, and “probably half are pedestrians”, says the Geneva-based Forum.

The report cites the “well-known causes” of traffic accidents: unsafe roads, reckless or drunken drivers, violations of the speed limit, passing other vehicles at dangerous locations, and failure to heed road signs.

Also contributing to the high rate of deaths and injuries is the circulation poorly maintained automobiles, trucks or buses that may have bald tires, bad brakes or broken lights.

Crashes involving public transportation are most common in countries of the developing South. Passenger buses make up the majority of such accidents.

Southeast Asia is experiencing a rapid process of “motorization”. There, half of all accident victims are motorcycle drivers, many of whom do not wear protective helmets.

In 1998, nearly 1.2 million people were killed in traffic accidents, but a relatively few 140,000 of these were in industrialised countries.

The rest, more than a million people, “lived and died in Africa, Asia, South and Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe.”

These accidents have high economic costs for developing countries as young male adults, ages 14 to 45, are most often the victims, and they constitute society’s most productive group in terms of income.

The people who are hurt in road incidents, many of whom are left crippled for life, occupy a quarter of all hospital beds in poor countries, on average, says the Forum.

Adnan Hyder, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, in the U.S. city of Baltimore, calculates that the total cost of traffic accidents in developing and emerging economies “is at least 100 billion dollars a year.”

That sum is “more than twice the total aid received from all bilateral and multilateral sources,” adds Hyder.

Road accidents are ninth leading cause of death worldwide today, says the expert, “and are expected to become the third leading cause in 20 years.”

According to the Forum’s report, policy-makers, health professionals and even the public do not pay much attention to the problem of road accidents, probably because individually these incidents are “much less spectacular than plane crashes or railway disasters”.

Too few leaders have recognised the seriousness of this global trend, says the document.

The Global Forum for Health Research and the World Health Organisation’s department for the prevention of injuries and violence, are promoting the efforts of a research network on road safety.

At the Forum’s next annual meeting, to take place in Tanzania in November, the issue of traffic accidents in the developing South will be the subject of a special session.

The research network is financing projects in Uganda, Kenya and Pakistan that got under way this month. The initiative in Uganda seeks to assess how well visibility enhancers — like reflectors and lights — work in accident reduction.

In Kenya, the project entails interviewing all parties involved or interested in dealing with traffic accidents in an attempt to reach consensus on priorities for prevention and control.

Interviewees include drivers, passengers, police, medical personnel, legal experts and representatives of transport companies.

The effort in Pakistan is to evaluate the impact of such accidents on health and transport systems nationwide.

The Global Forum for Health Research was founded as a group aimed at correcting what is known as “the 10/90 gap”, arising from the fact that just 10 percent of the public and private resources spent on health research goes towards studying 90 percent of the world’s disease burden.

The Forum cites a study published earlier this year by the British Medical Journal which concludes that “half the battle” in accident prevention is raising public awareness of the problem.

A report mentioned in the Journal, states that if people use seat belts in automobiles, their probability of dying in an accident is reduced 65 percent.

But the Automobile Club of Italy reports that not even 20 percent of drivers in that country “buckle up”. In the rest of Europe, seat belt use reaches 80 percent.

An interesting statistic arising from these studies is that driver-side airbags decrease the likelihood of death by just eight percent.

The number of fatal road accidents is on the rise in poor nations, but in the European Union they diminished 20 percent between 1988 and 1998. The most notable improvements were recorded in Austria, Finland and Sweden, which saw a 30 percent decrease in traffic deaths between 1992 and 1998.

Greece and Ireland are the only two countries of the European bloc where the number of traffic-related fatalities has risen over the last decade.