Pakistan Flooding News

Islamabad - The United Nations on Tuesday expressed concern over deteriorating health conditions in Pakistan's flood-affected areas and warned of an increasing threat to life.Twenty million refugees are living in relief camps or out in the open with little food, clean water or medical supplies. Reports of waterborne diseases including diarrhoea, gastroenteritis and skin diseases have been coming from the camps."The expectation is that the number of sick people will increase, the number of mortalities will increase," Dr Abdullah Assaedi, deputy regional director of the World Health Organization, said.Assaedi said floods had damaged or destroyed 20 per cent of the nation's health facilities and 30,000 medical workers were affected.Officials also said three people had died at relief camps.A 4-year-old boy had died of gastroenteritis at a camp in the southern port city of Karachi, health officials were quoted as saying by the Dawn newspaper. A 6-day-old infant had reportedly died of tetanus.Medical officer Khalid Ansari said a team had diagnosed 400 people with high fever and gastroenteritis, most of them women, children and elderly people. Skin diseases were also very common, he added.Officials in Rajanpur, a city in the central province of Punjab, which has been heavily flooded, said a 17-year-old girl had died of gastroenteritis at the district hospital.UNICEF said Tuesday that women and children, "not in hundreds of thousands but in millions," were at risk."We have a country that has endemic water diarrhoea, endemic cholera, and endemic respiratory infection. And we have conditions for much-expanded problems in those areas," Daniel Toole, the agency's regional director, said in Islamabad.The floods triggered by heavy monsoon rains two weeks ago have killed 1,400 people so far, submerged one-fifth of the country's land area and destroyed more than 700,000 houses as well as hundreds of kilometres of roads and numerous bridges.The UN has appealed for 460 million dollars to help at least 6 million people, but the country needs billions of dollars in the long term for rehabilitation.Martin Mogwanja, UN humanitarian coordinator for Pakistan, complained of the slow international response, saying the UN had so far received only 160 million dollars of donation pledges."This is far less than what we need at this urgent time as millions of people remain in urgent need," he said.The World Bank announced that it would provide 900 million dollars for reconstruction, but it was not clear whether the money was in the form of a loan or grant.Food was also short at the relief camps in Punjab and in the southern province of Sindh, forcing people to take to the streets.Police baton-charged flood victims who scuffled during the distribution of relief items in Sukkur and Nowshero Feroz districts of Sindh. Duniya television reported that four were injured in Sukkur.In Leyyah, hundreds of people blocked a main highway with piles of stale bread that the authorities had supplied at the relief camps.UNHCR, involved in major relief work in the south-western province of Balochistan, said Pakistan's emergency continues to worsen as bloated rivers head southwards, flooding new areas and triggering massive further displacement.With flood waters still surging, the Pakistan Meteorological Department has forecast rain and thundershowers in upper parts of the country.