Injury resulted from accident has replaced infectious disease as leading cause behind children deathin Asia, said the United Nations Children's Fund (UNCEF) on Tuesday.

Child injuries account for half of the roughly 1.4 million child deaths recorded each year in East Asia and the Pacific, a UNCEF news release issued here quoted a research result as saying.

"Twenty-five years ago, a small number of infectious diseases were causing the majority of deaths among children," UNICEF Regional Director of East Asia and the Pacific Mehr Khan was quoted as saying.

"Now that our efforts to eliminate infectious diseases have been largely successful in the region, we are finding that injuries are killing an ever-larger proportion of our children," said he.

Drowning is either the leading cause of death or one of the leading causes of death in children under five in most countries in the region, according to the UNICEF document.

In Vietnam, for example, drowning killed nearly six times as many as communicable diseases, it said.

If injury were prevented among Vietnamese infants and children,the under-five mortality rate would fall by almost 40 percent.

As children get older, road traffic accidents become a leading cause of death, along with intentional injury from physical assaults or suicides.

Other significant dangers in the countries studied are burns and scalding, which kill more children than dengue fever, as well as falls, which are responsible for more child deaths than tuberculosis.

Hazardous environment, lack of knowledge and attention and deficiency of legislation and law enforcement are believed to hamper efforts to cut down injury killing or wounding children in the region.

Some 98 percent of all child injuries occur in the developing world, noted the document.

It affirms that the injury-related deaths and permanent diseases are as preventable as those caused by measles and other infectious disease, for the industrialized world has successfully cut down the number of children who die from injuries by more than 50 percent over the past 50 years.

Source: Xinhua