Video from First International Symposium on Road Safety in Low- and Middle-Income Countries Now Available

Around the world, an estimated 1.3 million people die every year due to road traffic crashes. If not action is taken, injuries are predicted to become the fifth leading cause of death globally by 2030.

On October 16, 2014, as part of the effort to draw attention to this growing burden of road traffic injuries, JH-IIRU held its first-ever International Symposium on Road Safety in Low- and Middle-Income Countries at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, sponsored by the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Road Safety Program.

Videos of the event are now available for viewing on our YouTube channel. Access them here.

Find the agenda for the symposium here.

IIRU team members and Global Road Safety collaborators participated in sessions that included risk factors for road traffic injuries; post injury and trauma care; and monitoring and evaluation for road safety. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Dean Michael J. Klag opened the symposium and special guest Dr. Anselm Hennis, Director of the Department of Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), spoke of the importance of global road safety.

The symposium was designed to create awareness of the global burden of road traffic injuries especially in LMICs; to share knowledge generated and lessons learned from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Road Safety Program; and to facilitate networking and collaboration between road safety colleagues globally.

Currently, JH-IIRU is participating in the second phase of the Bloomberg Initiative on Global Road Safety. The program aims to reduce fatalities and injuries from road traffic crashes in 10 cities at both the national and the city levels.

Find out more about the project here.