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[quote:2ac7c]GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- One person commits suicide roughly every 40 seconds, one person is murdered every 60 seconds and one person dies in armed conflict every 100 seconds, the World Health Organization report said Thursday.

Overall, WHO estimated that 1.6 million people met premature and ugly deaths in 2000.

In what it described as the most exhaustive international study into the problem, the U.N. health agency highlighted the extent of violence in the home and on the street; abuse of children and the elderly; suicide and war.

"The figures for violent death tell only part of the story," said the report's author Etienne Krug. "Physical, sexual and psychological abuse occur in every country on a daily basis, undermining the health and well-being of many millions of people."

Krug's team spent three years writing the 346-page report, based on research from 160 experts on 170 countries.

The report said an estimated 520,000 people were murdered in 2000 -- not including unlawful deaths disguised as accidents or natural causes. For every person who died, 20-40 others were hospitalized with injuries.

The toll included 199,000 young people aged 10-29 who were invariably killed by other young people -- often the result of alcohol and drug abuse or easy access to firearms.

Racial differences
It said youth homicides in the United States, in many Latin American countries and the former Soviet bloc soared, while stabilizing or falling in much of Western Europe and Canada.

Within countries, there were big social and racial differences. In the United States, African-American youths are 12 times more likely to be murdered than whites.

Krug said that WHO had no plans to lobby the U.S. or any other government for tighter gun control laws as part of the violence prevention campaigns.

"Clearly not, it's not our role," he said.

An estimated 57,000 young children died from abuse -- often head injuries or suffocation -- with preschoolers most at risk.

It said that millions more children were the victim of beatings -- citing as an example a recent survey in South Korea where 67 percent of parents admitted whipping their children to discipline them, and 45 percent reported hitting, kicking or beating them.

In 48 surveys from around the world, 10-69 percent of women reported being physically or sexually assaulted by an intimate male partner at some point in their lives and as many as 20 percent of women suffered sexual abuse as a child, it said.

It cited a recent national survey in South Africa that school teachers were responsible for 32 percent of disclosed child rapes.

Abuse
At the other end of the age scale, WHO said that abuse of elderly people by relatives and other caregivers was "increasingly being recognized as a serious social problem."

"It is also a problem that may continue to grow as many countries experience rapidly aging populations," the report said.

In some developing country cultures where women have inferior social status, elderly women were at even greater risk than men -- being abandoned or having their property seized once they were widowed. In the extreme case of Tanzania, an estimated 500 elderly women accused of witchcraft -- often connected with an event like crop failure --were murdered every year, it said.

The report estimated that 815,000 people killed themselves in 2000 -- making suicide the 13th leading cause of death worldwide. People older than 60 were most likely to take their own life.

On average men were three times more likely to kill themselves than women, although in China the rate was about the same for men and women. In general, about 10 percent of people who attempt suicide eventually kill themselves, it said.

The highest rates were in eastern Europe and the lowest in Latin America. But this masked big differences between rural and urban populations and different racial and ethnic groups within countries. Among the Inuit people in northern Canada, there were overall rates of suicide of between 60 and 75 per 100,000 people compared with 15 per 100,000 for the general population, it said.

WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland said she hoped the report would break taboos surrounding violence in the home and suicides.

"To many people, staying out of harm's way is a matter of locking doors and windows. To others, escape is not possible. The threat of violence is behind those doors," said Brundtland.

"And for those living the midst of war and conflict, violence permeates every aspect of life," she said of the 310,000 people who died in wars.

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http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/10 ... index.html