Overloaded vehicles, high speeds and tired drivers are most to blame for China's high road accident death rate, say officials. The country's supercharged economy is spurring road construction and car ownership, along with demand for goods to be shipped to market. (EyePress/Associated Press)

What's the most dangerous thing you can do while travelling abroad? Depending on the foreign country, some would say drink tap water. Others might suggest imbibing something stronger on the wrong side of town. Or perhaps a flight on a dodgy airline, or getting involved in local feuds and political disputes.

The correct answer may be something much more prosaic. Ottawa does not keep track of why or how Canadians are killed or hurt in other countries, but officials concede that traffic accidents rank among the major causes of death or serious injury abroad. A road journey in any country can kill you, but some countries are much more dangerous than others.

Statistics compiled by the United States and Britain say vehicle crashes are the leading cause of accidental death for American and British nationals travelling or resident abroad.

People who live in the developing world fare even worse. A recent report from the World Health Organization [WHO] says vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death around the world among people aged between 10 and 24. Nearly 400,000 of those killed in road accidents every year are under 25, the report says.

Many crashes in developing countries involve pedestrians and vehicles, or people travelling on group transport, such as a bus or a truck loaded with people going to market. As countries develop, the risk of road crashes increases. Poorer countries have lower accident death rates than middle-income nations like China or India.

Those two countries account for close to half of the world's deadly traffic accidents, despite having just a fraction of the private cars and other vehicles. Nearly 600 people are killed on the highways and back lanes of China every day, a number that has soared recently as the country's white-hot economy spurs road construction and car ownership. As India races to catch up with China economically, road deaths there are surging ahead too, some 400 to 500 every day. In 2000, some five million Indians had a car. Now that number has more than doubled and is growing at close to 10 per cent a year.

Death rates down in Canada

Meanwhile, developed countries like Canada are seeing road wrecks decline. While young drivers still have the highest accident rate, decades of safety campaigns and law enforcement have steadily driven traffic deaths down across the country. An aging population of slower drivers probably hasn't hurt either.

But it's getting worse elsewhere, in part because people are travelling more as they become wealthier. The WHO says soaring accident rates are "an important obstacle to health and development," because the costs are being borne disproportionately by families and the poor.

"Globally, millions of people are coping with the death or disability of family members from road traffic injury," says the WHO report, "Many families are driven deeply into poverty by the loss of breadwinners [or] the burden of caring for members disabled by road traffic injuries."

The report takes governments and international agencies to task for not addressing road safety seriously enough, and not seeing vehicle accidents as a public health challenge that will soon surpass HIV/AIDS or tuberculosis as a cause of death. Often existing laws against dangerous or drunk driving are not enforced, says the WHO, which calls for more training for police and the introduction of graduated licence programs aimed at easing younger drivers into traffic, and imposing stiffer penalties on them for infractions like impaired driving.

Fatalism to blame: officials

India's federal and state governments are heeding the call to take road accident prevention seriously. The Indian parliament has passed laws calling for a steep increase in penalties for traffic offences, including mandatory prison sentences for drunk driving. Alcohol consumption is thought to be a factor in more than half of the accidents involving long-distance transport trucks in India.

Other factors in Indian crashes include badly maintained vehicles, people driving without licences and a disregard for the consequences of reckless driving, described by an Indian state government website as "unwarranted fatalism." Indian roads, even highways, are often used as social gathering places, sports fields or space for family activities. Police are now being told to discourage this, officials say.

Other countries are also starting to take the problem seriously. South Africa has seen road accident death rates stable for the past decade, after they soared in the 1980s. In part, a government safety awareness program called "Drive Alive" is given credit. A conference on road safety in Africa was recently held in Ghana, with delegates from every country on the continent. Saudi Arabia — with the second-worst road fatality rate in the Middle East, after Oman — is also trying to reduce the carnage on its roads with government advocacy and strict law enforcement.

Interestingly, women drivers have a much lower accident rate than men. Saudi Arabia's refusal to allow women behind the wheel might be one of the factors in its high road accident rates.

More money, more traffic deaths: WHO

The inescapable conclusion of soaring traffic accident rates in developing countries around the world is that more wealth means more crashes. ''When you have economic development, a human disaster often follows on the roads," says Etienne Krug of the WHO. ''There's a big drama going on of all these lives lost. People believed if they were going to be a more developed country, they needed more roads and cars, and the price to pay will be more fatalities. But we can show them this doesn't have to be the case."

As for Canadians travelling abroad, at the moment Ottawa doesn't offer advice on road safety or the risk of traffic accidents. Other countries' consular services do, flagging places with high road death rates and urging caution about using public transport or cheap taxis. For now, Canadians have to rely on common sense and local knowledge to avoid what is increasingly all too common for residents of developing countries.

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