Tehran ranked first among provinces in terms of fatal road accidents involving pedestrians during March-June 2005.

Road accidents claimed 6,729 lives in the first quarter of the current Iranian year (started March 21), an official with the State Forensic Medicine Organization said.
Director general of the organization’s Public Relations Office was quoted by IRNA as saying that although accident death toll in spring 2005 increased by 1.8 percent compared to same period of last year, figures indicate a decline in the overall growth rate during this period.
Highlighting that Tehran ranked first among provinces in terms of fatal road accidents involving pedestrians during March-June 2005, Saeed Shah-Hosseini argued that this testifies to hazardous driving behaviors of Tehran citizens--not to mention that the province has better medical facilities available. Most victims of Tehran’s intercity accidents die in hospitals, he regretted.
The official put the number of road mishaps involving fatalities at over 26,000 last year (ended March 20), with almost 60 percent of the mortalities caused by head injuries.
More than 60 percent of motorcyclists and bikers lost their lives as a result of brain hemorrhage--a fact which highlights the significance of wearing protective helmets, Shah-Hosseini concluded.
In related news, head of the Road Maintenance and Transportation Organization pledged that by implementing a comprehensive road traffic plan and employing modern smart technologies, road safety would improve nationwide.
Mohammad Bokharaei called on all entities involved in the sector to assist the organization in maintaining road safety as well as providing fast inexpensive transportation.
The organization has given priority to accident-prone spots.
In addition to improving road conditions, the official said, the national transportation fleet should be renovated, encouraging private investors to inject their capital into the transport sector.
The outdated fleet and the rising number of vehicles are responsible for a major portion of annual road accidents.
According to Bokharaei, renovation of ageing vehicles has accelerated in recent years as a result of over 1,000 to 1,500 new buses joining the fleet annually.
“The average age of the road fleet has been reduced to less than 12 years,“ he noted. The corresponding figure ranges between eight and 10 years in developed nations.

Family planning is the core of the state’s maternal health programs, deputy minister of health, treatment and medical education said.
Speaking at a panel discussion on “Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on Reducing Child Deaths and Promoting Maternal Health,“ Hossein Malekafzali cited figures which demonstrate the degree to which national birth control programs have been successful.
“The number of couples in the childbearing age who use any of various contraception methods has increased from 49.9 percent in 1989 to 73.8 percent in 2000,“ Malekafzali revealed.
Health houses active countrywide render free birth control services including Intra Uritine Devices (IUD), condoms, contraceptive pills, depo shots, tubal ligation and vasectomy to couples to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Noting that women’s health is closely tied to their maternal health, the official added that either every village or every few rural districts have one health center with trained medical personnel ready to educate local inhabitants.
He put the number of health houses active nationwide at 17,000--one for every 1,400 rural dwellers.
According to Malekafzali, mobile clinics were also assigned to provide villagers with primary medical and birth control services in far distant areas.
He noted that over 80 percent of rural districts had been brought under coverage of family planning programs, regretting that some far-off remote areas were still deprived of such services.
Malekafzali, who is also head of Iran’s Family Planning Association, believes that improving quality birth control programs and checking the rate of unwanted pregnancies are among the most important challenges facing the Health Ministry.
He named measures to prevent illegal and unsafe abortions and reduce sexually transmitted infections as other priorities of the ministry and the association.
No reliable figures are available on the rate of abortions terminating unwanted pregnancies.
Malekafzali stressed that illegal abortions could be reduced, if reliable, effective and modern methods of birth control became widely accessible.
Addressing the same gathering, World Health Organization’s representative in Iran said the panel discussion aimed to raise public awareness about MDGs as well as focus on the twin objectives of reducing child morality rate and promoting maternal health.
Mobasher Sheikh reiterated, “The Millennium Development Goals target halving the proportion of the population in extreme poverty, ensuring primary education for all children, reducing child and maternal deaths, promoting gender equality, and empowering women by 2015.“
Over six million under-five children lose their lives annually across the globe due to malnutrition, Sheikh said, adding in excess of 2.6 million people are also deprived of basic sanitation.
“More than half a million women die in childbirth annually“, he noted, insisting that providing the world population with comprehensive healthcare services can save millions of lives each year.

Mohammad Reza Rahchamani

Chief of the State Welfare Organization, Mohammad Reza Rahchamani, said state subsidies set aside for non-governmental educational and rehabilitation centers rendering services to unidentified people or those without guardians can increase up to 60 percent of the designated amount, ISNA reported.
SWO is obliged to provide these centers with monthly allowances for assisting the mentioned people.
“As per a new bylaw approved by the cabinet, SWO is permitted to pay equal to 60 percent of the subsidies offered to private non-state care centers to families that are looking after persons covered by the bylaw,“ Rahchamani said, adding the amount is increasable in Tehran as well as in deprived and tropical areas up to 10 percent of the grants. The criteria for being considered a remote tropical area need to be defined by the Management and Planning Organization (MPO).
The non-governmental rehabs and care centers benefiting from grants stipulated in the bylaw need to observe standards set for educational, healthcare and nutrition services, he said, adding their activities will be monitored by the SWO.

Empowerment schemes have been devised with an eye to the climatic and sociocultural peculiarities of each province.

Rural inhabitants in 15 provinces will be covered by the community-based empowerment program with a total fund of 100 billion rials in the current year (started March 21), according to Fars news agency.
Deputy minister of welfare and social security for planning and policymaking affairs, Mohammad Reza Vaez Mahdavi, enumerated East Azarbaijan, Hormuzgan, Sistan-Baluchestan, Kohkiloyeh-Boyerahmad, Kerman, and Fars as some of the provinces that are benefited by the plan.
“The government will act as facilitator rather than the executor of the scheme. This will help people prioritize their requirements first and to present ways and means of meeting those needs,“ he added.
“Empowerment schemes have been devised with an eye to the climatic and sociocultural peculiarities of each province.“
The programs aim to empower people in social, cultural and economic dimensions. One way to achieve that goal is to create opportunities for employment and production.
Vaez Mahdavi insisted that empowerment is a long-term process, commending the outcomes of similar schemes which have not only helped curb migration toward cities, but have encouraged the return of migrants to rural districts.
Vaez Mahdavi cited forming and empowering local communities, boosting self-reliance in rural communities, and providing financial resources through loans as the main objectives in view.

Bushehr Bazaar (Photo by Mohsen Shahrnazdar)

No domestic criteria have been devised to serve as point of reference for evaluating individuals’ height and weight, director general of the Health Ministry’s Office for Improvement of Nutrition said.
As reported by ILNA, Robabeh Sheikholeslam recalled the cabinet ministers had endorsed a proposal to develop yardsticks for evaluating the height and weight of under-five children five years ago. “The scheme has been abandoned ever since,“ she added.
Sheikholeslam stated that no benchmarks had been developed to evaluate the height and weight of adult Iranians. “All previous research mainly focused on children, and even those have been largely forsaken.“
Sheikholeslam blamed the official ignorance of the important issue and highlighted the need for defining such national benchmarks.

A senior official blamed China’s gender imbalance on outdated traditional thinking and an inadequate social security system, vehemently denying that its decades-old one-child policy is to blame, AFP reported.
There are 117 male births for every 100 female births in China, compared with the global newborn ratio of between 103 and 107 boys for 100 girls.
“This high ratio is a manifestation of the inequality between men and women. It is also a reflection of the violation of girls’ rights to survive and their rights to development,“ Gu Xiulian, president of the official All China Women’s Federation, told a press conference.
Experts have warned that up to 15 percent of China’s male population could be without a female partner in the coming decades.
The shortage of women in some areas of China has already become a problem. Thousands of Chinese women are abducted by human traffickers every year in increasingly sophisticated cross-provincial underground operations.
Experts have blamed the country’s one-child birth control policy.
They say the traditional preference for boys, especially in rural areas, means many parents will consider aborting an unborn girl in order to try for a boy under the one-child policy.
Gu denied strongly that the national policy, implemented since the late 1970s, was to blame for the gender imbalance.
“The main reason is the traditional view that male is more important than female and it is still active in Chinese people’s minds,“ she said.
Another reason is the lack of social security in rural China, meaning old people still have to be provided for by male offspring who labor on farms to bring in incomes, she said.
These factors, coupled with the ultrasound technology which can test the gender of fetuses before birth, have encouraged abortions, she said.
She said the country has already taken measures to tackle the problem including outlawing ultrasound testing of the gender of unborn babies.

New Orleans evacuee Taisha Blackwell, carrying her one-year-old daughter Tramine Cowart, cries as she talks about Hurricane Katrina in Los Angeles, California, September 6. (Reuters Photo)

If refugees end up building new lives away from New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina may prompt the largest US black resettlement since the 20th century’s Great Migration lured southern blacks to the North in a search for jobs and better lives, Reuters reported.
Interviews with refugees in Houston, which is expecting many thousands of evacuees to remain, suggest that thousands of blacks who lost everything and had no insurance will end up living in Texas or other US states.
Officials say it will take many months and maybe even years before the birthplace of jazz is rebuilt.
“We advise people that this city has been destroyed,“ New Orleans Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley told reporters. “We are simply asking people not to come back to this city right now.“
Many evacuees say they cannot keep their lives on hold for very long.
Experts caution that it is too soon to clearly predict the long-term impact of the devastation of New Orleans, a city of less than half a million people more than two-thirds of whom are black. But one scenario would be massive resettlement elsewhere.
“You’ve got 300,000, 400,000 people, many of them low income without a lot of means, who are not going to have the ability to wait out a year or two or three years for the region to rebuild,“ said Barack Obama, the only black member of the US Senate. “They are going to have to find immediate work, immediate housing, immediately get their kids into school and that probably will change the demographics of the region.“
Because of the legacy of slavery, southern states including Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have historically been home to the greatest concentration of US blacks. In 1900, 85 percent of US blacks lived in the South and as early as 1830, more than 58 percent of Louisiana’s population was black.
Between 1940 and 1970 economic changes prompted five million blacks to quit the South for cities across the North including Chicago, Detroit and New York, marking one of the nation’s largest internal migrations.