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Finding an African solution
Emmanual Lagarde, the road trauma specialist at INSERM, the French medical research institute, is trying to encourage governments and road authorities around the world to offer specialist assistance to Africa to help combat the continent’s accelerating road toll.
He says in a discussion paper that traffic deaths in Africa are now at the highest rate in the world (50 per 10,000 vehicles) and that if the current upsurge in vehicle ownership continues, the mortality rate could jump by 80% within 12 years.
In the paper just published by the international health journal, PLoS Medicine, M. Lagarde says while developed countries are experiencing declines in road mortality rates, on present trends Africa could be counting 144,000 road deaths annually by 2020—more than twice the number who died in 1990.
But M. Lagarde admits the problem is not going to be easy to fix—especially as so little is actually known about the subject. So to help find the solution, he want to encourage an international effort to collect the data needed to launch properly targeted safety programs.
For example, while introducing strict speed limits might appear to be a quick fix, that would be difficult to do without an adequate infrastructure and police force willing to book offenders. But M. Lagarde says he has discovered that in some parts of Ghana, authorities have been able to overcome enforcement problems by building speed bumps.
The result has been a 55% reduction in fatalities. Another problem to overcome is people’s attitudes: “In Africa, driving a car is still considered a privilege, an enviable option, not a risky task with inherent responsibilities,” he says.
