Global road traffic injury statistics: Challenges, mechanisms and solutions

High-quality data are the foundation to monitor the progress and evaluate the effects of road traffic injury prevention measures. Unfortunately, official road traffic injury statistics delivered by governments worldwide, are often believed somewhat unreliable and invalid. We summarized the reported problems concerning the road traffic injury statistics through systematically searching and reviewing the literature. The problems include absence of regular data, under-reporting, low specificity, distorted cause spectrum of road traffic injury, inconsistency, inaccessibility, and delay of data release. We also explored the mechanisms behind the problematic data and proposed the solutions to the addressed challenges for road traffic statistics.