Road deaths are a global epidemic on the scale of malaria and tuberculosis and world leaders must do more to address the issue, a report said on Thursday.

The Commission for Global Road Safety, headed by former NATO chief George Robertson, said 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million injured every year worldwide in traffic accidents.

More than 85 percent of the casualties were in low and middle income countries, with road deaths second only to AIDS as a global killer of young men.

The Commission said the Group of Eight, made up of the world’s richest countries, must back a $300 million, 10-year action plan to address the issue in developing countries.

Robertson said it needed the same attention from the G8 as was given to the “Make Poverty History” campaign, which lobbied political leaders to write off billions of dollars of debt owed by the world’s poorest nations.

“In 2005 millions of people, and the leaders of the G8, responded to the call to Make Poverty History,” Robertson said in a statement.

“Yet the gains for development won in 2005 will be at risk if action is not taken to reverse the growing epidemic of road traffic death and injury, with its terrible human and economic cost.”

The report said that despite causing death on a similar scale to malaria and TB, road safety was not included in the Millennium Development Goals and so received far less in overseas funding.

It estimated that the economic cost to low and middle income countries was $65-100 billion.

Robertson called for “political leadership” from the G8 along with a significant increase in resources.

The commission’s findings will be presented to world leaders before the G8 summit in St Petersburg in July in an effort to have road safety put on the agenda of future summits.

The report also called for a United Nations Road Safety Summit to be called to coordinate an international policy for preventing road injuries.

“Five hundred children are dying every say and thousands more are being disabled or injured,” said Formula One driver Michael Schumacher, a member of the commission set up by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) Foundation.