ABSTRACT
Injuries and fatalities occur in all forms of transportation but numerically road traffic accidents account for the great majority worldwide, causing more than 3000 deaths each day and killing more than a million people annually and injuring some 20-50 million. If the current trends continue, road traffic injuries are predicted to come the fifth leading cause of death by 2030. Approximately 90 per cent of these deaths occur in low-and middle-income countries, where the road traffic fatality rates (21.5 and 19.5 per 100,000 population, respectively) are higher than in highincome countries (10.3 per 100,000 population). In 2010 the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 64/255 which proclaimed the period 2011-2020 as the Decade of Action for Road Safety. The goal of the Decade is to stabilize and then reduce the forecast level of road traffic fatalities around the world by increasing activities conducted at national, regional and global levels. The Global status report on road safety by the the World Health Organization (WHO) published in 2013, is the second broad assessment of the status of road safety in 182 countries, building on the first Global status report on road safety published in 2009, the latter of which used data drawn from a standardized survey conducted in 2008. Large regional disparities exist in the death rates of road traffic accidents, the risk being highest in the African region (24.2 per 100,000 population), and the lowest in Europe (10.3 per 100,000). Young adults (between 15 and 44 years) account for almost 60 per cent of all traffic
deaths, and half of the world’s road traffic deaths occur among pedestrians (22 per cent), cyclists (5 per cent) and motorcyclists (23 per cent). Proportion of deaths among different road user types show, however, considerable inter-and intraregional variation.1,2
The pattern of injury, fatal and otherwise, varies considerably depending upon whether the victim is a vehicle occupant, a motorcyclist, a pedal cyclist or a pedestrian.
