On September 11, 2001, the twin towers of the
World Trade Center were destroyed and history recorded
that over 3,000 people were killed. Not many people
know that about the same number of people die every day
on roads world wide1. This figure does not include at
least the 30,000 others injured or disabled. This accumulates
to over 1 million people killed and between 20-
50 million injured or crippled in road accidents each
year2. It is obvious that road traffic injuries are a major
public health problem globally. In fact, as projected by
the WHO that road traffic disability-adjusted life years
(DALYs) loss will move from being the ninth leading
cause of DALYs in 1999 to the third leading cause by
year 2020 as shown in Table 13.
While low- and middle-income countries are facing
more serious road accident problems, the trend in
high-income countries is in the opposite direction. As
can be clearly seen from Figure 1, trends over time show
a sharp difference in fatality rates between high- and lowincome
countries4. Fatality rates in high-income countries
have been declining, while in the low- and
middle-income countries, they are still on an upward
trend. Although the magnitude of increase varies by region,
it is unfortunate that the highest rise is in Asia.