This statistic genuinely stopped me. According to the WHO, road crashes are the leading cause of death for everyone aged 5 to 29 worldwide. Not disease. Not anything else. Crashes. About 1.19 million people die on the roads every year.
We usually call these “accidents,” but public health people look at them differently. A lot of them are predictable and preventable: seatbelts, speed limits, not texting, not driving tired or impaired, safer road design. When you treat it like a system instead of just bad luck, you can actually lower the numbers.
The reason this matters for people my age specifically is that a lot of us are getting our licenses right now. And remember my sleep post? Driving tired is a real factor, and teens are some of the most sleep-deprived people out there. So two of my blog topics literally crash into each other here (sorry).
The fixes are small and kind of boring: buckle up every single time, put the phone away, don’t drive exhausted. Boring habits, but they save more young lives than almost anything else in this whole blog.
Bottom line: The number one killer of people our age is preventable with seatbelts, no phones, and not driving tired.
Read more: Road traffic injuries — World Health Organization
The Global Pulse 