The latest report published by World Health Organization (WHO), reveals that Thailand’s notorious road safety issues have not improved very much at all.
While the newly revealed rate of 32.7 deaths per 100,000 people is an improvement from 2015’s rate of 36.2, the kingdom’s grisly butcher’s bill remains tops among Asian countries and a dispiriting sixth place globally.
The report, which was released Friday and contains data from 175 countries, estimates that an average of 22,491 people are killed on Thai roads each year.
Among our Southeast Asian neighbors, Vietnam was next with a rate of 26.4 — more than six fewer deaths per 100,000 than Thailand — followed by Malaysia at 23.6. Singapore remains the safest country in the region with a rate of 2.8.
Aside from Thailand, Venezuela and the tiny Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, the remainder of the top 10 is comprised of countries from sub-Saharan Africa.
Globally, the statistics don’t look much better.
The report reveals that road traffic deaths continue to rise and have, in fact, become the leading killer of people aged 5 to 29 years old globally.
With an estimated 1.35 million deaths each year, more people now die from road traffic injuries than from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis or diarrhoeal diseases.
“This report is a call for governments and partners to take much greater action to implement these measures,” said WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
WHO’s status reports are released every two to three years to serve as the “key monitoring tool” for the Decade of Action for Road Safety, which runs from 2011-2020 — a proclamation made by the UN General Assembly in 2010 with the goal of reducing road accidents globally.
The most recent WHO road safety report released prior to this was in 2015.
Though Thailand’s roads are dangerous all year round, the carnage especially skyrockets every April during the Thai New Year — also known as “Songkran.”
To learn more, watch Coconut TV’s short documentary about the the 7 Dangerous Days of Songkran, when Thailand becomes arguably the most dangerous place on Earth to be on the road.
