The Road Ahead
Issue 10
PAST EVENTS
9th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Control
The WHO cosponsored 9th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Control was held in Merida, Mexico in March 2008. During the plenary sessions three state-of-the-art presentations were made on road traffic injury prevention:
In addition to these plenaries, many oral presentations were made on road safety issues. These are all now available online at the following website:
http://www.who.int/roadsafety/about/resolutions/download/en/index.html
Drinking and driving manual launched in New Delhi
The manual was launched on 22-23 February 2008 in Bangalore, India, at a workshop organized by the Global Road Safety Partnership and attended by 115 participants. The workshop was inaugurated by Mr David Silcock of the Global Road Safety Partnership, Prof Gururaj of the National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences, Dr Santikarn Chamaiparn of WHO South-East Asia and Mr Johnson J Edayaranmula. The workshop had several speakers from inside and outside India. The workshop deliberated on the problems pertaining to prevention of drinking and driving in India and made recommendations with regard to raising awareness, data collection, enforcement, revision of legislation, funding and implementation of several measures. The workshop recognized the importance of implementing the recommendations and proposed that a programme to reduce drinking and driving should be developed using a scientific approach, consisting of proven interventions and incorporating evaluation.
New traffic injury prevention project for WHO
As reported in the January 2008 issue, in August WHO received a grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies for a new road traffic injury prevention project with two components. The following is a brief update:
Pilot country projects: The last six months have been devoted to setting up the projects and developing work plans for each country: Viet Nam and Mexico. Technical and support staff have been recruited in both countries to facilitate this process. Consultations have been carried out to identify appropriate local partner agencies, both governmental and nongovernmental. The key risk factors to focus interventions on have been specified for each country: drinking-driving and helmet for Viet Nam, and seat-belt use and drink-driving for Mexico. Work plans have been developed through a collaborative process and submitted to the appropriate national government agencies for approval. The emphasis in both countries is on national ownership and collaboration among agencies. A situational assessment has been conducted in Viet Nam and Mexico is preparing for a similar activities. This is being followed in each country by implementation of activities at provincial or state levels: three provinces in Viet Nam and four states in Mexico. The activities include building capacity for law-makers and public health officials, training the police to improve enforcement of legislation and supporting nongovernmental organizations in their prevention work, review of legislation and supporting processes to revise or amend. These projects will be evaluated to determine the effects of intensive road safety programmes, especially estimating number of lives saved and contribution of the programmes to strengthening road safety efforts in the two countries.
For more information contact Meleckidzedeck Khayesi at khayesim@who.int
Global status report on road safety
Over the last few months trainings of National Coordinators (NDCs) for the Global status report have been conducted in all regions as follows:
Follow up: since the regional trainings a number of follow up trainings have been conducted (either in person or by teleconference) to train the NDCs who were unable to attend the regional trainings.
Next steps: NDCs have begun their work and are at various stages of data collection. Some have already completed and entered data into the Datacol system. Data collection should be complete by the end of July 2008 with another month to enable data clearance.
For more information, please contact :
Dr Krishnan Rajam (rajamk@who.int) for the WPRO region,
Dr Hala Aboutaleb (aboutalebh@emro.who.int) for the EMRO region,
Dr Salim Chowdhury (chowdhurysm@searo.who.int) for the SEARO region,
Dr Dinesh Sethi (din@ecr.euro.who.int) for the EURO region,
Dr Olive Kobusingye (KobusingyeO@zw.afro.who.int) for the AFRO region,
Dr Vilma Gawryszwski (gawryszv@paho.org) for the the PAHO region, or
Dr Tami Toroyan (toroyant@who.int) at WHO HQ
PUBLICATIONS
All publications can be ordered, free of charge, via our publication order form on
http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/orderform/en/index.html
The UN Resolution on "Improving Global Road Safety" (A/RES/62/244) in six languages is available at
http://www.who.int/roadsafety/about/resolutions/download/en/index.html
Good practice manuals
On 3 March, GRSP launched the third publication in the series of road safety manuals "Speed management: a road safety manual for decision-makers and practitioners". It was jointly developed by GRSP, WHO, the FIA Foundation for the Automobile and Society and the World Bank. The manual is available at
http://www.who.int/roadsafety/projects/manuals/speed_manual/en/index.html
The helmet manual is now available in French and Portuguese at
http://www.who.int/roadsafety/projects/manuals/helmet_manual/en/
The drinking and driving manual will be translated into Spanish by December 2008 and will be online at
http://www.who.int/roadsafety/projects/manuals/alcohol/en/
The seatbelt manual will be available shortly.
World report on child injury prevention
A global report on unintentional injuries to children is currently under development. It includes a chapter on children who are involved in road traffic crashes. It is due for launch in December 2008. For further information about this report please go to:
http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/child/injury/world_report/en/index.html