World Day of Remembrance for Traffic Victims

Sunday, November 18th, 2007, is World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.

In 2002--a typical year--nearly 1.2 million people worldwide died as a result of a road traffic crash.

This represents an average of 3242 persons dying each day around the world. In addition to these deaths, between 20 million and 50 million people globally are estimated to be injured or disabled every year.

Road traffic crashes rank as the 11th leading cause of death and account for 2.1% of all deaths globally.

The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims was started by RoadPeace in 1993. Since then it has been observed and promoted worldwide by several NGOs, including the European Federation of Road Traffic Victims (FEVR) and its associated organizations.

On 26 October 2005, the United Nations endorsed it as a global day to be observed every third Sunday in November each year. This will be a major advocacy day for road traffic injury prevention and WHO and the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration encourage governments and NGOs around the world to commemorate this day. WHO, FEVR and RoadPeace have jointly developed a book, World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims: a guide for organizers, to provide practical guidance to people or groups on how to plan and organize events on this day. The book gives a brief history of the day, offers suggestions on how to plan the day and provides examples of specific activities that can be organized. We encourage all those concerned with road traffic crashes and their consequences to use this guide to organize annual events in different parts of the world to ensure that the advocacy opportunity of this day is fully realized.

More information from WHO here.

Download the book here.