By Xing Bao

　　ACCIDENTS have become the top killer of Chinese children. Every year some 100,000 children are killed and 400,000 become disabled in accidents, said an expert from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences during the International Forum on Children's Issues which ended last Saturday in Shanghai.

　　Statistics show that in China the accident related mortality is around 50-per-million for infants, and seven-per-million for children between one and four years old. Both figures are much higher than those in developed countries.

　　A national survey conducted a few years ago found that the top cause of death among babies is suffocation, while that for children between 1 and 4 years old is drowning. Death caused by traffic accidents are also increasing rapidly. Sudden falls, along with injuries caused by animals and fires are also counted among the main causes of children's deaths.

　　Despite the death toll, a safety culture is still sorely lacking in most parts of China, even in big cities like Shanghai.

　　This can easily be shown by the limited demand for children's safety equipment here, which leads to prohibitively high prices for such products, said Heather Paul, an expert from SAFE KIDS Worldwide, an international network dedicated to childhood unintentional injury prevention.

　　"More than 50 hours of wages are required in China to purchase a quality child safety seat, versus 2.5 hours in the United States," she said.

　　There are 540 million bicycles in China and 16 million cars. Yet bicycle helmets are rarely used, despite the fact that China is a major manufacturer of helmets for export.

　　For school-age children, game and sports periods have actually become the most likely time for children to be injured, according to research conducted by Sun Hongyan from the China Youth and Children Research Centre.

　　Sun's survey, which covered 5,846 students in ten different cities, found that about 53.6 per cent said they often or sometimes got injured when playing games or sports at school.

　　Those who said crowded corridors accounted for most of their injuries totalled 13.1 per cent, while 6 per cent said injuries were most likely while engaged in chemical or physics experiments at class.

　　In Shanghai, insgroupsto reduce risks, some schools have even cut physical exercise classes.

　　"That surely is not a healthy way to prevent injuries. The most important thing may still be to enhance educational campaigns, laws and enforcement," experts said during the forum.