“USING the mobile while driving led to the loss of my right arm,” Mahmoud Reda, an Egyptian road-crash victim, told participants at an event organised in Cairo to mark the World Day of Remembrance for Road Accident Victims, reports Nesmahar Sayed. According to the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Global Status Report on Road Safety, Egypt loses about 12,000 lives due to road-traffic accidents annually. Forty-eight per cent of those killed are passengers of four-wheel vehicles, though pedestrians also constitute 20 per cent of fatalities. The numbers stress the urgency of reducing the number of road-traffic victims by about 50 per cent by 2020, Reda told participants at the event organised by the Nada Foundation for Safer Egyptian Roads and entitled Mechanisms to Reduce the Number of Road Accidents by 2020. The Schools Area Project, an initiative aimed at raising awareness among children and preventing road accidents in school areas, was also launched during the event. It was important to establish a National Council for Road Safety that would have the authority and facilities to coordinate the implementation of safety measures among the authorities concerned with road safety, Nehad Shelbaya, chair of the board of the Nada Foundation, told Al-Ahram Weekly. Shelbaya, who lost her daughter Nada in a car accident, stressed the need to raise awareness among drivers and decision-makers and use new technology in building roads and vehicles to reduce human error. Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day, according to the US Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT). An additional 20 to 50 million are injured or disabled, the ASIRT said, with more than half of all road-traffic deaths occurring among young adults aged 15 to 44. Road accidents rank as the ninth leading cause of death and account for 2.2 per cent of all deaths globally, the organisation said.
