HANOI, May 25 (Xinhua) -- Four junior school students from Vietnam's northern Lao Cai province drowned when swimming in a local stream on Saturday, Vietnam News Agency reported.
Six students in the sixth grade of Quang Kim junior high school in Bat Xat district swam in the nearby stream on Saturday afternoon. Seeing one student was going to drown, three others rushed to rescue, but all the four eventually drowned in the river.
"Drowning is a silent epidemic claiming more than 2,000 children's lives per year in Vietnam," an official from the World Health Organization in Vietnam told Xinhua, adding that the rate of child drowning in Vietnam is higher than other Southeast Asian nations and 10 times higher than that of developed countries.
The official said many deaths caused by drowning in Vietnam were preventable, and the drowning rate among local children would fall if adults supervised kids' activities more closely, and more kids were provided with survival swimming and water safety skills.
