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OVER the
past several decades, the rate of mortality and
morbidity due to road-traffic accidents has risen to
very alarming levels that it has become a matter of
great concern in many countries all over the world.
In the
United States, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Schools
of Medicine and Public Health have found that although
men are three times more likely than women to be killed
in car crashes, when the total number of crashes are
considered, female drivers are involved in slightly more
crashes than men. Overall, men were involved in 5.1
crashes per million miles driven compared with 5.7
crashes for women, despite the fact that on average they
drove 74 percent more miles per year than did women.
The
investigators (coauthors Gabor Kelen, MD, professor and
director, Emergency Medicine, the Johns Hopkins School
of Medicine; and Susan P. Baker, PhD, professor of
Health Policy and Management, the Johns Hopkins School
of Public Health), who published their results in the
July issue of Epidemiology, found that although teenage
boys started off badly with about 20 percent more
crashes per mile driven than teenage girls, males and
females between ages 20 and 35 were equally at risk of
being involved in a crash, and after age 35 female
drivers were at greater risk of a crash than their male
counterparts. Each year, highway crashes claim about
40,000 lives, cause three million injuries, and cost the
nation $140 billion. The study was supported in part by
a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
Alcoholism and a grant from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report
“The Global Burden of Disease,” deaths from
non-communicable diseases are expected to climb from
28.1 million a year to 49.7 million by 2020—an increase
in absolute numbers of 77 percent since 1990. Traffic
accidents are the main cause of this rise. Road-traffic
injuries, currently ranked ninth, are expected to take
third place in the rank order of disease burden by the
year 2020.
The WHO
report further said that every day 1,000 people under
the age of 25 are killed in traffic accidents, 90
percent occurring in low- to middle-income countries
mainly in Africa and Asia. Most victims killed between
the ages of 15 to 20 are pedestrians, and some are
motorcyclists or passengers who ride on cheap public
transport.
In the
Philippines, the statistics seem to hold true.
According to Transportation Undersecretary Anneli Lontoc,
who is calling for the implementation of a nationwide
road-safety plan for 2008, more women are now driving
cars on the road but more accidents involve men due to
their aggressive driving and their preference for riding
motorcycles and jeepneys.
The root
causes are faulty road design, lack of education and
“Filipino time.”
“Eighty
percent of accidents are attributable to human factor,”
Lontoc said.
Road
safety has become one of the Department of
Transportation and Communication’s top traffic concerns
that it recently pooled the country’s think tanks to
assess the situation and zero in on an ambitious plan to
drastically reduce the country’s road-accident growth
rate from 4.2 percent to 2.1 percent over the next five
years.
Gerardo
Pinili of the Land Transportation Franchising and
Regulatory Board points out that the Department of
Education should include basic driving in the
high-school curriculum, observing that most
public-utility drivers and motorcyclists are just
high-school graduates. Pressing on education,
Undersecretary Lontoc said that simple things like
stop-look-and-listen are very useful in teaching
children road-safety awareness. By doing this, she hopes
that the country will benefit from a renewed set of
drivers’ psyches by 2010. |
