Asian road accidents peak in Thailand

BANGKOK, March 8 (TNA) - The Thai government has already handled road accidents as a national agenda, as the death rate of Asian road accidents peaks in Thailand. Thai Permanent Secretary for Interior Phranai Suwannarat acknowledged at a seminar on road safety in Asia, held in Bangkok on Wednesday, that road accidents worldwide have killed about 1.2 million people and injured another 20-50 million people annually. Phranai quoted the Geneva-based World Health Organization or WHO as predicting that the annual death toll from road accidents worldwide could further rise to 2.4 million people, making road accidents to become the fifth biggest cause of world fatalities by 2030 unless there were serious solutions. In Thailand, Phranai said, the number of road accidents, as well as the injured, the disabled and the dead from road accidents are critically high, noting that in 2011 alone, road accidents in Thailand killed more than 10,000 people, or claiming 33 lives a day on average or three lives in every two hours. According to the senior official, the death rate from road accidents in Thailand now appears to be the highest in Asia and the Pacific, prompting the Thai government to have already included road safety in national agenda in a bid to minimize damages from the road accidents. The March 7 Global Road Safety Partnership Asia Seminar drew representatives from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation or ThaiHealth, the Road Safety Center under the Thai Ministry of Interior's Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation and the Global Road Safety Fund. (TNA)