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Posted on 04/07/2004 3:15:22 PM PDT by BenLurkin
PARIS (AFP) - Scores of events unfolded to mark road safety as the theme of World Health Day amid warnings that China and other fast-track developers in Asia face a bloody epidemic of road deaths.
"Many countries in Asia have rushed to embrace prosperity and on the way, there are many bodies, figuratively and literally, lying on the road," Lee Jong-wook, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said Wednesday.
"This is the other side of the coin of rapid development. People now are rushing to get a car," he said in an interview with AFP.
"Clearly they have do something drastic to reduce the toll," he said, adding that "China's an obvious case" of a country at risk.
Lee was in Paris for the launch of World Health Day which this year, for the first time, chose road accidents as a theme -- commemorated in poster and media campaigns and ceremonies around the globe -- that needs greater public awareness.
Traditionally, the annual event is given over to a contagious disease or medical condition, such as AIDS (news - web sites) or malaria.
"It is an unusual decision, but the right one, because the health implications for this issue are huge," said Lee.
"More than one million people die each year (from road accidents), there are between 20 and 50 times as many who are wounded, families are affected and there is the huge economic cost.
"(...) Something can be done and something can be done quickly and the mortality can be reduced by 10 percent or 20 percent or half."
The WHO and the World Bank (news - web sites) on Tuesday published a major report on road accidents and guidelines for preventing them.
In the history of the motor car, some 30 million people have died on the road -- the equivalent toll of a world war -- and the annual cost is put at more than half a trillion dollars.
Developing countries, especially in Asia, are most at risk, given the rush to buy cars and the often backward state of roads, vehicles and driver training.
In the 15 countries of East Asia and the Pacific, road fatalities numbered 10.9 per 100,000 people in 2000; this will rise to 16.8 by 2020, the experts predict.
The situation is even grimmer in the seven countries of South Asia, where the fatality toll is forecast to rise from 10.2 per 100,000 people to 18.9.
"If the low-income and middle-income countries follow the general trend of the high-income countries, their fatality rates will begin to decline in the future, but not before costing many lives," says the study, entitled, "World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention".
In the case of India, the fatality rate has more than quadrupled in less than 40 years -- and the death toll will continue to rise inexorably, only going into decline in 2042, according to the computer model.
China last year accounted for 104,000 of the world's road fatalities, even though it has just two percent of the world's vehicles.
Every year, 11 million new drivers take to China's roads.
"The number of people killed in traffic accidents in China each year is higher than any other country in the world," Zhang Ping, a division head of China's public security traffic management bureau, told AFP in Beijing this week.
During Viet Nam I suggested that we bring all the troops home and put them to work at Ford and Chevrolet building cars to ship to Nam. Then give every person in South Viet Nam a car and a full tank of gas. It would be the most dangerous country on the planet and no army would even think of invasion.
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