World leaders must do more to tackle the road deaths "epidemic" a safety report said today.
A child dies every three minutes in a road crash, according to the report, which was publihsed in London today by the Commission for Global Road Safety.
Failure to tackle road deaths will jeopardise key development goals on health and poverty, said the commission's chairman, former Nato chief Lord Robertson.
The report showed that around the world:
- 1.2 million people are killed, and 50 million injured each year on the roads;
- 500 children are killed every day;
- 3,000 people are killed each day and 85 per cent of casualties are in low and middle-income countries;
- Road deaths in these countries are forecast to double by 2020.
The report argued that road deaths were a global epidemic on the scale of malaria and tuberculosis yet received funding which was a tiny fraction of that allocated to the two diseases.
Lord Robertson will be sending the report, entitled Make Roads Safe, to all the G8 leaders in advance of the St Petersburg G8 Summit in July, and is calling for global road safety to be included in the agenda of a future G8 summit.
To promote the messages of the report, a campaign was started today, led by the European automobile group the FIA Foundation and the RAC Foundation.