CAIRO, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- Senior officials from the Egyptian health ministry and the World Health Organization (WHO) met in Cairo on Thursday to discuss means to reduce road accidents in the most populous Arab country.
The issue was discussed in a meeting entitled "Road Safety in Egypt" at the WHO regional office in Cairo, official MENA news agency said.
Egyptian Health Minister Ahmed Rady said at the meeting that his ministry has taken a lot of measures to efficiently deal with road accidents, such as improving the timing of ambulance response.
Rady added that the health ministry also conducts anti-drugs campaigns and carries out blood tests to drivers to ensure they are drug-free, urging other concerned authorities to raise awareness of road accidents among Egyptians.
The meeting was chaired by Rady and attended by WHO regional representatives as well as representatives from the Red Crescent and the Egyptian ministries of interior, transportation and social solidarity.
In 2016, at least 14,710 traffic accidents killed about 5,343 Egyptians and injured 18,646 others, with 72 percent of accidents due to human error, 18.2 due to technical problems of vehicles and 3.1 due to road problems, according to a report from Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS).
This shows that road accidents are declining in Egypt as previous WHO reports said they killed 12,000 people every year in the North African country.
Over the past few weeks, at least 100 Egyptians were killed and a similar number of people were wounded in fatal accidents in Beni Sweif, Sharqiya, Luxor and South Sinai provinces in the country.
