“Road Crashes Cost Mexico Up to 5 Billion Dollars a Year”
El Financiero reports:
“We found that, considering only the medical care costs and the productivity losses estimated in this study, the economic burden stands at between 55 and 92 billion pesos in 2024,” explained Belén Sáenz de Miera Juárez, professor and researcher at the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur.
“Road crashes are predictable and avoidable. They are not ‘accidents’ or random events; they are the result of gaps in infrastructure, failures in regulation and lack of control of risk factors,” said Erick Antonio Ochoa, director of the organisation Salud Justa Mx.
Read complete original article
Other Articles on the Same Topic
- Road Crashes Cost Mexico Up to 92 Billion Pesos a Year: Young People Are the Most Affected (Infobae)
- Alcohol Consumption in Adolescence (El Heraldo de México)
Assessment
The study, “The Cost of Road Crashes in Mexico”, was presented by Salud Justa Mx together with academic researchers and covers medical care and lost productivity in 2024. The range of 55 to 92 billion pesos – about 3 to 5 billion US dollars – equals up to 0.3% of GDP, and the authors note it is an undercount because property damage and long-term care of injured people are left out.
The burden falls on the young: Infobae reports that one in three deaths occurs among people aged 18 to 30, and road crashes remain among the leading causes of death for Mexicans between 5 and 44 years of age.
The study identifies speeding, alcohol-impaired driving and missing safety equipment as the main factors aggravating injuries.
Mexico has had a legal framework for acting on these risk factors since 2022, when the General Law on Mobility and Road Safety was approved, but state-level harmonisation has progressed slowly. The organisations presenting the study call for speed limits, sobriety checkpoints, vehicle safety standards and infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists – the road users who account for eight of ten urban deaths.
Enforcement of laws against alcohol-impaired driving, including random breath-testing and sobriety checkpoints, is one of the interventions in the World Health Organization’s SAFER package of most cost-effective alcohol policy solutions, and the effect is documented in Mexico itself: Mexico City’s Conduce sin Alcohol breathalyser programme has reduced alcohol-related crash deaths in the capital by 70% since it began in 2003.
Mexico still has no national alcohol policy to carry that result to the rest of the country.
The same day the study was presented, El Heraldo de México published a column on adolescent alcohol use built around FISAC, the Mexican alcohol industry’s front group directly funded by the country’s major alcohol producers. The column cites ENSANUT data showing that one in five Mexican adolescents aged 10 to 19 uses alcohol, and that an estimated 112 people die every day in Mexico from alcohol-attributable causes. But after citing this data, the alcohol industry lobby group claims the answer to be a “cultural change” in how families relate to alcohol, promoting FISAC’s “responsible consumption” campaigns – not WHO alcohol policy recommendations – and its own upcoming congress. Among the campaign messages the column lists is “if you drink, don’t drive”.
Road safety is an area FISAC has occupied since its founding in 1981.
Movendi International has covered FISAC’s positioning work before: alcohol industry organisations run this kind of programme precisely so that the debate stays on individual behaviour and never reaches the structural policy solutions that prevent alcohol harm in traffic – breathalyser enforcement, blood alcohol limits, and common sense limits on availability, higher standards for alcohol marketing and alcohol price increases.
Movendi International is also tracking the science of effective solutions to prevent alcohol impaired driving. Research is clear documenting two important dimensions for the Mexican case:
- The alcohol industry uses the road safety agenda to protect its sales, derail effective alcohol policy, push for narratives and measures that are ineffective, and benefit its own reputation.
- Population-level alcohol policy solutions and evidence-based measures to prevent alcohol-impaired driving are the most cost-effective tools governments have to increase road safety.
While civil society and academia have launched a thorough analysis of the costs of road traffic crashes, including those due to alcohol-impaired driving, the alcohol industry took action to distract public attention and promote itself and a harmful narrative about the causes of alcohol-impaired driving.
The researchers of the road crash cost study made the fiscal argument themselves: every peso spent on crash care is a resource lost to prevention and social development. On the alcohol-attributable share of that burden, public support for action is documented – research by Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health and the national mental health commission CONASAMA found that 85% of Mexicans approve policies to reduce alcohol use.