There were flowers every few hundred meters or so at the side of the road from the Bolivian capital La Paz to the country's Yungas region further east.
The flowers marked the spots of a grim carnage. The road runs through a mountain pass, soaring above 5,000m in some places and narrowing to less than two meters. With boulders to one side and a sheer drop of hundreds of meters on the other, the road often could not cope with the press of traffic negotiating its uneven surface.
Typically this traffic is made up of lorries loaded with fruit and vegetables from mountain villages on their way to market, often with the villagers themselves sitting on top of their produce.
All too frequently, a truck goes off the road and plunges down the mountainside. Hence the flowers, laid over the years by grieving relatives.
"They are aerial deaths," quipped my driver, not a joke calculated to reassure. About 200 people a year died on that one stretch of road, he told me.
In western Europe, the road would have been closed as just too dangerous. In low-income Latin America it remains a lifeline for local farmers and, ironically, a death trap.
More than 1 million people in developing countries die every year in road traffic accidents out of a global total of 1.18 million road deaths, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. While this is about the same as malaria, the problem of road deaths receives only scant attention. The WHO is now attempting to put that right.
This Wednesday is World Health Day, an annual day organized by the WHO to mark its foundation. This year, for the first time in its history, the WHO is devoting the day specifically to road safety.
The WHO says road crashes currently account for one in five of injury-related deaths and rank as the ninth leading cause of global mortality.
The WHO warns that current figures are bad enough, but the statistical trends are even more alarming.
If projections prove correct, by 2020 the number of people killed or maimed every day on the world's roads will grow by more than 60 percent and the number of road accident fatalities will pass the death tolls of both malaria and tuberculosis, WHO director-general Lee Jong-wook said.
RSS