Health worries mount for quake victims in Azad Kashmir
PakistanTimes.net AJK Bureau Report

MUZAFFARABAD (AJK): Sickness is increasing among Pakistani earthquake survivors, a UN official said on Thursday, after the government dramatically increased the death toll from the disaster.

The United Nations, heading an international relief effort, says donors have failed to provide sufficient funds for emergency aid work. It says that as many people as died in the quake could perish in the winter unless help reaches them fast.

“The situation is quite desperate,” the chief UN disaster coordinator, Rashid Khalikov, said in Muzaffarabad, the devastated capital of Azad Kashmir. “We have noticed a sharp increase in acute respiratory infection that can lead to pneumonia,” he said.

He said seven deaths from water-borne diarrhea had been reported from a town in North West Frontier Province, although there had been no reports of deaths from exposure.

The UN children’s fund says measles is also spreading in cramped tent settlements and it is launching a vaccination drive in the coming days.

“What worries us most is the dramatic increase in vulnerability of the population, and there are not so many coping mechanisms that they have to deal with this,” Khalikov said.

Recap

President Pervez Musharraf this week urged survivors living in communities high in the mountains to move to lower ground for the winter, saying they would not survive in emergency tent shelters.

However, aid workers say many are reluctant to leave behind crops, livestock and the remains of ancestral homes to move into lowland tent villages.

Khalikov said the top priority was people living at 5,000 feet (1,500 metres), and there were at least 150,000 of them in two areas of Northwest Frontier Province alone, he said.

It was unclear how many people in all might be heading to lower, warmer areas as the harsh winter set in, he said. “It is very difficult to plan. It has never happened before. We can only guess whether they will come down or not and when they will come down,” Khalikov said.

The United Nations has complained that it has received only about 20 percent of the funds it needs for emergency relief.

Pakistan will host an international donors’ conference to be attended by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Nov. 19 to raise funds for reconstruction estimated at $5 billion.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), which says 2.3 million people need emergency food, said that unless the money is forthcoming it cannot pay for the helicopters needed to position winter food stocks for survivors over the next four weeks.

“It’s a disaster,” said the WFP’s chief coordinator in Muzaffarabad, Keith Ursel. “At first there will be a reduction in the number of flights. When the fuel tank is empty your car stops, so we’re not stupid, we’ll try to keep some running all the time,” he said.●