Wed May 14, 2003 09:55 AM ET
GENEVA (Reuters) - Traffic kills four times as many people as wars
and far more people commit suicide than are murdered, the World
Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday.
In two reports on injuries, both
accidental and deliberate, the United Nations agency said they
killed more than five million people in 2000, one tenth of the
global death toll.
Nearly 90 percent of injury-related
deaths took place in poorer countries.
Road deaths, totaling 1.26 million,
claimed the highest number of victims, followed by suicide at
815,000 and interpersonal violence at 520,000.
Wars and conflict ranked sixth --
between poisoning and falls -- with 310,000 deaths.
WHO said age, sex, geographical
region and income level all played a part in the distribution and
incidence of fatal injuries.
Such fatalities were twice as
prevalent among men as women, the reports said. Three times as many
men, for example, died in road traffic accidents as women. And men
were also three times as likely to be murdered.
Death rates from road accidents,
burns and drowning were particularly high in Africa and Asia, and
homicides were three times as frequent as suicides in Africa and the
Americas.
But in Europe and southeast Asia
suicide rates were more than double murder rates.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=WT54KEET2CQKACRBAEKSFFA?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2740739 |
