Roads are becoming more deadly in developing countries

By THE DATA TEAM

ONE out of every 40 people who died in 2015 was killed in a vehicle accident, either as a driver, passenger or pedestrian. Globally, road accidents are less deadly than the most common killers around the world: cancers, ischaemic heart disease and strokes. According to the World Health Organisation,1.3m people were killed on roads out of 56.2m total deaths, or a death rate of 2.4%. In contrast, the death rates for cancers and heart disease was 15.5% each; it was 11.1% for strokes.

In some countries, roads are so perilous that the probability of dying from a vehicle impact is greater than from the most prevalent natural causes of death. The Middle East has the deadliest roads. Of the world’s eight countries with the highest rates, six border the Persian Gulf; a seventh, Jordan, sits next door. These mostly oil-rich states offer cheap petrol that encourages their citizens to drive. Their relatively weak enforcement of traffic laws, even where speed limits are high, leads to risky driving. (Venezuela, the only country in the top eight outside the Middle East, is also a big oil producer, bolstering the evidence for this explanation.) In Saudi Arabia, the interior minister argued that the decision to allow women to drive, announced this week, would greatly improve road safety, though he gave no explanation.

However, on current trends Africa may one day overtake the Middle East. All 12 of the countries that saw the biggest percentage increase road-related fatalities in 2000-15 were African.

A recent report from the University of Michigan looked at the likelihood of dying from a road-related accident compared with the three leading worldwide causes of death. In several countries on the continent, the likelihood of dying in a road accident is almost twice as high as that of dying from cancer, heart disease or stroke. For example, in Kenya, road accidents claim lives 80% more often than heart disease, and a fifth more than strokes. Others like Burundi, Uganda and Zimbabwe are similarly afflicted.

However, these ratios reflect not just an unusually large numerator (the number of road deaths) but also an anomalously low denominator. Africa has a comparatively low proportion of deaths stemming from diseases that tend to strike in old age. Just 18% of African deaths are as a result of cancer, heart disease and stroke, compared with 42% for the world as a whole. That is in part because AIDS and other communicable disease claims many the lives of many Africans before they live long enough to succumb to those ailments.