Up to 2007 Guyana’s roadways remained the deadliest in the Caribbean region averaging almost 20 casualties per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) list of countries with the most traffic casualties.
According to the data, at the end of 2007, Guyana saw 19.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with Suriname following close behind with 18.3 deaths per 100,000.
St Lucia came in third with 17.6, followed by the Dominican Republic with 17.3, Trinidad and Tobago with 15.5 and the Bahamas with14.5.
Guyana may now have been surpassed by countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, which have seen an upsurge in road fatalities in recent times. The WHO has now started collecting new statistics for a report set to be published next year.
The Global Status Report, under the ‘Decade of Action for Road Safety’ project that will last until 2020, will be the second of its kind since the launching of the WHO project. The first report was published in 2009 but used the same data from 2007.
The WHO said it was engineered in the direction of launching the project since road traffic injuries are a leading cause of death, killing nearly 1.3 million people annually. According to the WHO, approximately 90% of these deaths occur in low and middle-income countries.
“Unless action is taken urgently, the number of road traffic injuries and deaths is likely to continue to rise in most regions of the world as motorisation increases,” WHO said.
Indeed, according to the world health body, if current trends continue unabated, road traffic injuries are predicted to rise from their current position as the ninth leading cause of death to become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030. To begin to addressing the problem, in 2004 WHO and the World Bank jointly launched the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention. This World Report outlines the major risks for road traffic injuries, and recommends a number of interventions that countries can implement to improve their road safety situation. However, until recently the extent of the road safety situation around the world was unclear.
Speaking about the 2009 report, the WHO said it had gathered information from member states using a standardised method in order to ensure that data collected were comparable. In that way, it provided the first assessment of the road safety situation at the global level, and revealed the gaps that exist in national road safety efforts.
In the 2009 report, it was stated that as of 2007 Guyana saw some 207 deaths, with 74% of the victims being males and the remainder females.
The current report being worked on by the WHO is expected to be published next year.
