'The leading cause of childhood injury and death is road crashes, which kill 260,000 a year globally and injure about 10 million.'
'Children from poorer families are far more likely to die or be harmed than their better-off counterparts,' according to the WHO.
'The poorer children have not shared equally in the progress of the last 20 years.'
This is not news, but is reported as news regularly by newspapers, which sometimes behave in ways that suggest their readers are like goldfish. While papers like the Guardian deserve credit for writing about these issues, it would be better if they referenced their own articles that cover the same subject. In this case, the following three refer to the inequality in child pedestrian casualties in the UK.
'Poverty puts children at higher risk of accidents' - 2008
'Pedestrian road deaths linked to deprivation' - 2008
'Road death risk higher for deprived children' - 2002
The fact that around 3,000 people die on the roads every year in the UK and 3,000 die every day globally (which we highlighted recently) masks 'a very deep social divide, a strong and persistent social divide' (as Professor of Child Health, Elizabeth Towner, puts it), only goes to emphasise how big an issue this is.
Cadence's Karl Hallam worked on 'Streets Ahead - Safe and liveable streets for children' and is currently looking at global road safety issues with ippr in advance of a United Nations Ministerial road safety conference in 2009.
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