Good morning, and thank you to the FIA Foundation and AIPF for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the World Health Organization today. I’m delighted to be here, and happy to see many old and new friends around the room.
As happy as I am to see all of you, we are here today because of a deeply serious reason. And that is, every day, every week, every year – too many people die on our Region’s roads.
Every minute, someone dies on a road in WHO's South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions. That's approximately 630,000 lives lost every year, representing more than half of the global toll. Behind every statistic is a family receiving a knock on the door or a phone call that changes their lives forever.
I was asked to speak about this issue today from a public health perspective – so let me take a moment to go back to some first principles, which explain why, for WHO, this issue is such an important priority.
At its core, public health is about preventing harm before it happens, and creating the conditions for people to live healthy, productive lives. So three principles are key:
- The first is prevention – as the primary goal;
- The second is equity – which demands that we pay particular attention to both the most vulnerable and those disproportionately affected by any particular health issue; and
- The third is that data, science and evidence should inform everything we do.
So applying these principles to the topic of road deaths and injuries –
The data tells us that children, young people, motorcyclists and their passengers are at greatest risk – with motorcyclists and their passengers accounting for nearly half all deaths in Asia.
The equity dimensions of this issue are equally stark: the people dying and being seriously injured on this Region’s roads are mostly not in rich countries. More than 90% of road deaths occur in low and middle-income countries – a gross inequity.
But the most important public health message is this: these deaths and injuries are preventable. In a road crash involving a motorcycle, a safe, properly fitted and correctly worn helmet can dramatically reduce the risk of death and serious head injury. The challenge is not identifying the solution. It is creating the political will and systems needed to deliver it.
Let me now take a few moments to speak about Viet Nam as an example.
Viet Nam shows what decisive action can achieve. With almost 80 million registered motorcycles accounting for around 90% of vehicles, this is a country whose economy and daily life run on two wheels.
In 2007, the Government introduced its national motorcycle helmet law. Helmet use rose from around 30% to more than 90% almost overnight. In its first ten years of implementation, the law is estimated to have prevented approximately 500,000 head injuries and 15,000 deaths.i This was an extraordinary public health achievement, for which the Government of Viet Nam has rightly received international praise.
But Viet Nam’s experience also provides a warning: passing a helmet law is not the end of the task. Its impact must be continually protected through strong enforcement, comprehensive standards, and effective control of helmet quality.
And in some of these areas, important gaps remain: Viet Nam does not yet have a dedicated helmet standard for children; there is no penalty when a child under six is not wearing a helmet; and fake and substandard helmets remain widely available.
For helmets to be helpful in preventing deaths and head injuries, WHO’s guidance is crystal clear: a helmet saves lives only when it is safely designed, correctly fitted, consistently worn and meets an appropriate standard. Otherwise, you may as well not be wearing a helmet at all: a fake or substandard helmet is almost worse than no helmet – because it provides the illusion of safety where no protective effect exists.
No-one would knowingly take a fake or substandard medicine, and government regulators come down very hard on anyone trying to sell or profit from fake medicines – because they are a risk to public safety. The same principle should be applied to fake and substandard helmets.
So the takeaway for governments from example this is fourfold:
- set strong helmet standards;
- ensure helmets are tested and certified;
- keep fake and substandard products out of the market; and
- enforce correct helmet use for every rider and passenger, including children.
The benefits from this approach are clear: heads and brains protected, lives saved, and significant economic benefits (including for the private sector) gained.
I'm very proud of the work WHO and AIP Foundation are doing together in Viet Nam to put these principles into practice through Project 2000 – a partnership launched last year to reduce the number of children and young people killed on the country’s roads from around 2,000 each year to zero. Stronger standards and enforcement, in particular for children’s helmets, are central to this work.
And so this leads to the final reflection I will leave you with today, which is about the power and importance of partnerships in public health. The death and injury toll caused by road traffic crashes is not an inevitable cost of mobility or economic development. It is an entirely solvable crisis, but none of us can solve it alone.
That’s why the Safer Helmets Asia Pacific initiative is so important – because it gives us a platform for an important regional conversation about translating evidence into laws, policies and standards, standards into enforcement, and enforcement into lives saved. My thanks to the FIA Foundation and AIPF for launching this initiative, and please count on WHO’s continued support.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak today, and I wish you all a very productive Summit.
Xin cảm ơn!