Epidemic Fears Prompt Call for Clean Water in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As Pakistan reels from its worst floods in memory, United Nations officials said Monday that 3.5 million children and infants were at a particularly high risk of diseases borne by dirty water.

Clean water is an urgent need,” said Maurizio Giuliano, a United Nations spokesman, who said the international agencies dealing with children and health were both suffering from shortages of funds. The United Nations, whose secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, flew over flooded areas of Pakistan on Sunday, has appealed for international donations of $460 million, but only one-third of that of that has been provided, Mr. Giuliano said in a telephone interview.

“There was a first wave of deaths caused by the floods themselves,” Mr. Giuliano said. “But if we don’t act soon enough there will be a second wave of deaths caused by a combination of lack of clean water, food shortages and water-borne and vector-borne diseases.”

He said as many as six million people were at risk of diseases including diarrhea-related illnesses and dysentery, typhoid and forms of hepatitis.

“We may be close to seeing this second wave of death,” he said. “The picture is a gruesome one.”

With a shortage of aid funds, relief workers were currently able to provide clean water to only one million of the 6 million people in need, Mr. Giuliano said. Many people had no adequate shelter or proper food, he said, and, as in any crisis, “children are among the most vulnerable.”

The long-term economic and political damage wrought by the huge inundation is also likely to be costly. Roads, bridges and communications networks across the country have been severely damaged, Pakistani officials said.

Arbab Alamgir Khan, the federal minister for communications, said damage to roads alone was estimated at around $76 million, much of it in the northern province of Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa, where the floods started as monsoon rains pounded down earlier this month.

The threat of long-term damage has raised fears that the flood damage in Pakistan, a central pillar of American regional strategy to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, will add further instability to a mix of weak government and economic woes.

In the latest surge, floodwater submerged vast areas of Baluchistan and Sindh Provinces after causing massive destruction in the country’s north and in the central Punjab Province.

Television footage from helicopters showed a seemingly endless vista of muddy water, freckled with palm trees. The distribution of aid seemed chaotic in some parts with people jostling for handfuls of food thrown from trucks.

In Baluchistan Province in the southwest, rail service was suspended for three days starting Monday from the provincial capital, Quetta, to the provinces of Punjab and Sindh and floods were threatening the town of Osta Muhammad. Officials said Monday they were trying to evacuate thousands of residents there, while thousands more were stranded in Dera Murad Jamali town.

In Punjab, a second round of flooding threatened some areas such as Rajanpur, said Muhammad Usman, a provincial coordination officer.

“The second wave has hit us worse,” he said. In another area, where people had gathered after escaping earlier floods, a canal had burst its banks and relief workers were struggling to repair the damage.

“We are trying to fill that breach with heavy machinery but we have also warned people to be alert,” Mr. Usman said. Some people were preparing to move again, abandoning an area where floodwaters have cut roads and electric power supplies, but others insisted they would stay put.

Abdul Mohsin, a government education officer, scrambled to salvage the school records and said that, despite the threat of further flooding, not everyone was prepared to abandon their land and homes.

“My father is not ready to leave,” Mr. Mohsin said. “He has told the family to move and he will be on the roof of the house with his gun.”

Elsewhere, The Associated Press reported, angry flood survivors blocked a highway to protest delays in the delivery of aid as rain poured from leaden skies.

Some 20 million people living in about one-fifth of Pakistan’s surface area have been affected, according to official estimates.

In the Sukkur area, The A.P. said, hundreds of survivors complained bitterly that food aid was rare and was distributed only when television cameras were in the district. “They are throwing packets of food to us like we are dogs. They are making people fight for these packets,” a protester, Kalu Mangiani, was quoted as saying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/asia/17pstan.html?hp