Lead image for Road crashes kill 1.34 million, leave 50.9 million injured worldwide.
Road crashes killed 1.34 million people globally and left 50.9 million others injured in 2023, making road injuries one of the leading causes of premature death and disability worldwide.
This is according to a new study published in The Lancet Public Health, which shows that road injuries were the leading cause of death among people aged 10 to 39 and the second-leading cause of death among children aged five to nine.
The report comes as Kenya continues to record fatal road crashes. Last weekend alone, 21 people were killed in road crashes across the country within 24 hours.
Among the latest incidents was a crash in Ahero, Kisumu, in which two students from the Technical University of Mombasa (TUM) died and 29 others were injured while travelling to attend the burial of their student leader, Elvis “Beast” Otieno.
Globally, road injuries ranked as the 11th leading cause of death in 2023 and accounted for 75.3 million years lived with disability.
The study found that low- and middle-income countries continue to bear the greatest burden, with more than 90 per cent of road injury deaths occurring in these countries.
Between 1990 and 2023, global age-standardised rates of new road injury cases and deaths declined by 38.3 per cent and 32.3 per cent, respectively. However, the gains were uneven across income groups, with low-income countries recording nearly six times the rate of years of life lost to premature death compared with high-income countries.