Global Community Should Recognize Road Deaths As Growing Public Health Issue

“Car crashes and motorcycle accidents are symptoms of a disease, and it’s high time we started looking at killer roads as a public health crisis — or ‘pandemic,’ as the Pulitzer Center put it recently,” John Sutter, a columnist for CNN Opinion and head of CNN’s Change the List project, writes in a CNN opinion piece. He cites an ongoing Pulitzer Center project called “Roads Kill,” noting, “Roads kill 1.24 million people each year, and by 2030, that annual number is expected to jump to 3.6 million.” He provides statistics for various developing countries, including South Africa, the Dominican Republic, and China. “If road deaths are part of a disease, we know the cure,” Sutter continues, writing, “Countries like the United States and Australia have greatly lowered their rates of road deaths, in part with smart safety laws and levels of traffic enforcement that don’t exist in some other nations.” He encourages readers to “look at the Pulitzer report — it has a map where you can look up your country — and tweet about what you want to change, or what you’ve experienced on the roads in the place where you live.” He states, “No one anecdote will solve this problem, but the more we talk about it the closer we’ll get” (10/28).

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