Word: bangkok
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...Case in point: even though international estimates put Henan's HIV patient count at more than 1 million, a provincial health official told a Bangkok AIDS conference last month that there were only about 50,000 sufferers. Despite a decree from Premier Wen Jiabao that poor peasants should receive free treatment, a dozen HIV-positive villagers told TIME they had never received any medicine. Last week, 130 Henan peasants congregated in front of a local mayor's office to demand treatment. Li Dan also lodged a formal complaint with the Shangqiu health bureau asking for his orphan school...
...sometimes, the luckiest. At an intersection of Bangkok's busy Pattanakarn Road in June, the driver of a gray Hilux pickup lost patience waiting for an interminable red light and attempted a quick U-turn into oncoming traffic. He was rammed by a Toyota sedan; the impact spun one vehicle into six motorcycles whose riders were waiting at the light, while the other was propelled into two other motorcyclists turning into Pattanakarn Road. Although nine people were injured, no one died. Others have not been so fortunate. "This road is the worst," says Sommai Nutang, a 46-year-old truck...
...country's authorities are trying to bring the national accident rates down to the level of many Western countries. (With an average of 36 deaths a day, Thailand ranks sixth in the world in road fatalities, according to the WHO.) Workers at the center, located in government offices in Bangkok, collate reports of casualties coming in from police, hospitals and rescue workers around the country. The war room is also the staging area for the various programs established to make highways safer, particularly during holiday periods when fatalities spike. The government earlier this year set up extra checkpoints...
...blotter on his dark wooden desk, he traces a faint crease in his skin running from his left temple down to the corner of his mouth. "Thirty-four stitches," he says, then spreads his jaws and taps his upper teeth. "Not real." The scars are reminders of a 1988 Bangkok accident in which Nikorn's car was sideswiped by a drunken 18-year-old driving a pickup truck...
...Nikorn isn't expecting his campaign to win easy victories. The causes of accidents are so varied?poor roadway design, unsafe vehicles, and human error among them. There are no quick-fix solutions. Yordphol Tanaboriboon, a transportation-engineering professor at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, says one of the few generalizations that can be made is that the high proportion of motorcycles on Thailand's roads (of the country's 26 million registered vehicles, 12 million are two-wheelers; according to Nikorn, there are another 6 million unregistered motorcycles) is linked to a higher death rate. As many...