When we hear the word epidemic, we typically think of diseases, often communicable diseases but maybe we shouldn't, at least not always. An epidemic that isn't so much potential but real has been with us for at least a century and is only increasing in importance, namely, road injuries. Also important to remember that one doesn't need to be a driver to fall victim to road injuries. Victims include cyclists, motorcyclists, passengers and pedestrians as well.

Rubbernecking was one of the first phrases I added to my vocabulary when I came to the US. Needless to say I learned it in the context in which it is perhaps most often used, drivers slowing down to see what happened in a road accident. A 2014 report reckoned 1.2 billon vehicles that were expected to increase to 2 billion by 2035 (1).

The thing about hidden epidemics is we somehow learn to internalize certain costs, get habituated to them and keep on moving. Dangers inherent to an automobile in motion are precisely the type of costs our brains seem wired to discount. I hear or read an all too familiar regurgitation every time there's a plane crash, a statistical accounting of how much safer, despite that particular crash, plane travel is compared to automobiles. Numbers aren't apparently enough to leave an impression though. As prosperity increases around the world, increasing numbers of the newly affluent are taking to the roads in their new cars the world over, and inevitably, increasing numbers are dying or injured. After all, the driving habit is taking off in those places just as electronic distractions proliferate as well.

In my time behind the wheel, I've seen it all. From a seemingly endless stream of drivers with their eyes glued to their phones to someone looking in their vanity mirror, carefully applying mascara, another wielding an eyelash curler, someone else mouthing a spoonful, the other hand holding a bowl, drivers all. Wait a minute. That last one, did I really see that? I had to make sure I really did see it. Yes, no doubt about it, a driver behind the wheel eating their breakfast using a bowl and spoon, hands-free driving as far as I could tell. Rubbernecking. Did any of them or even me for that matter seriously consider we would rubberneck or be the object of someone else's rubbernecking that day as we got in our cars and started driving? Of course not. If we'd done that, how could we overcome our fear-induced paralysis to start driving? Sheer habituation and following inevitably in its wake, a hidden in plain sight epidemic of road injuries and deaths. The fact remains that in the US, the lifetime chances of dying in a car accident are apparently 1 in 606 compared to 1 in 174, 426 by lightning (2).

So let's look at some more numbers to better understand the contours of this particular epidemic. In 2015, the Lancet helpfully published a massive report by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation on global causes of mortality (3).

First off the bat, they include road injuries as one of the top ten causes of global death in a list that includes the likes of heart disease, respiratory infections and stroke (see below from 3).

Their analysis further concludes road injuries jumped up the list from #10 in 1990 to #5 in 2013 (see below from 3).

While adding more granularity to road injury data, the WHO 's 2015 Global status report on road safety is the typical Curate's egg, some good bits but mostly bad (4). According to them, though road traffic fatalities plateaued between 2007 and 2013, they're increasing in middle- and low-income countries (see figure below from 4).

Unfortunately, middle-income countries are where most of the world lives (see figure below from 4).

While Africa leads the world road injury fatalities per 100000 (see figure below from 4).

So what can be done? Can anything be done? The WHO data suggests it's going to be something we've seen before, a long, hard slog to enact and enforce safe driving practices. This includes traffic partitioning to protect those most vulnerable, tough drink-driving and helmet laws, strictly enforced speed limits and vehicles that meet not just basic safety standards, which shockingly most of them don't right now, but those that meet preferably the most stringent safety standards (see figure below from 4).

Bibliography

1. 1.2 Billion Vehicles On World's Roads Now, 2 Billion By 2035: Report

2. Mortality Risk

3. Naghavi, Mohsen, et al. "Global, regional, and national age-sex specific all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 240 causes of death, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013." Lancet 385.9963 (2015): 117-171. http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/jo...

4. The WHO 's Global status report on road safety 2015 http://www.who.int/violence_inju...

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-potential-epidemics-that-nobody-is-talking-about-as-of-2016/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala