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Pakistan Floods: 3.5 Million Children at Risk from Deadly Diseases, says UN
Shortage of clean water raises health fears as fresh protests erupt over slow delivery of aid
The UN said Monday that 3.5 million children in Pakistan are at risk from deadly waterborne diseases, as fresh protests erupted over the slow delivery of aid in the flood-ravaged country.
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, talks to young people affected by the Pakistan floods. (Photograph: Reuters) The warning comes two days after the UN reported the first case of cholera and its secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, urged the world to speed up aid efforts to tackle what he said was the worst natural disaster he had ever seen.
The UN has appealed for an initial £295m to provide relief, but only 25% of that has so far been given.
Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told the AFP news agency: "Up to 3.5 million children are at high risk of deadly waterborne diseases, such as watery diarrhoea and dysentery. Water during the flood has been contaminated badly. There is a shortage of clean water."
Delays in aid delivery and the continuing threat of further floods have resulted in widespread public anger that could bring political trouble for an unpopular government overwhelmed by the disaster, which has disrupted the lives of at least one-tenth of Pakistan's 170 million people.
Hundreds of villages across Pakistan in an area roughly the size of Italy have been marooned, roads have been cut in half and thousands of homeless people have been forced to set up tarpaulin tents along the side of roads.
Dozens of men and a few women tried to block five lanes of traffic outside Sukkur, in the southern province of Sindh, today. Villagers set fire to straw and threatened approaching motorists with sticks.
"We left our homes with nothing and now we're here with no clothes, no food and our children are living beside the road," said one protester, Gul Hasan.
Last night, hundreds of villagers in the Punjab, the country's most populous and worst-hit province, burned tyres and chanted "down with the government". "We are dying of hunger here. No one has showed up to comfort us," said Hafiz Shabbir, a protester in Kot Addu.
Neva Khan, Oxfam's country director in Pakistan, said: "The speed with which the situation is deteriorating is frightening. Communities desperately need clean water, latrines and hygiene supplies, but the resources currently available cover only a fraction of what is required."
A brief respite in rain has been forecast today. Water levels in the Indus river feeding Pakistan's plains have fallen in the Punjab, although floodwaters could stay high where embankments were breached and flooding could worsen in Sindh province.
"In Punjab, the water level in the river is falling and in the next 4-5 days ... there will be scattered rains, but they are not flood-producing," Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, director general of the meteorological department, told Reuters.
Despite a possible break in heavy rains, many families had little hope of returning to their homes. "We only hear that the water is receding but there is still more and more water in our village," said Mansha Bozdar, 45, whose village borders the town of Sanawan, in southern Punjab. "It seems if it will never stop."
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13 Comments so far
Show Alland the article about niger's imminent starvation has disappeared already into the archives.......
After several days there were only three comments on another story about these floods. Nobody seems to care, except you and me, Coco. Well, I guess that's something for us to be grateful for.
i noticed that too 4thefuture............
mine is still the only comment on the plight of the people of niger........(it was posted for one day only before it disappeared)
however, on the article 'why is the world unmoved by the plight of pakistan' there are 53 comments...........
strange...................
More broadly, I have observed that most of the environmental stories draw fewer comments than other stories. With the exceptions of the Gulf Disaster and climate change in general, stories about biodiversity, the sixth extinction, or specific, far-away environmental calamities draw fewer comments.
I hope Terre is correct, and I suspect he or she is. I think some stories are so horrific that people are frequently left dumbfounded and at a loss for words.
And by the way, I care!
i suppose you are right there fasteddie.............
but it's becoming patently clear that we have lost all 'hope'...........
not that the stories are so horrific (as they certainly are), but that they are so frequent that we are overwhelmed by them.................
I hate it when children suffer. My first reaction as a woman who loves children is what can I do to help? I worry about the future of all children on this planet as we still have so many people who deny climate change is real or that man is adding to the problem. Until we can wake up all those who deny climate change is real, how can we really change things for the better?
Waking people up is just the first step. Re-engineering an entire global economy from a system predicated on making profits while externalizing suffering (whether the suffering of children around the world or sea turtles in the Gulf) to a localized but globally integrated ecomomy that is humane and sustainable--and doing so against the strong resistance of those who currently control the global economy--is step two.
Pessimism warning! It's not going to happen. Suffering is going to increase. Do what you can, and steel yourself for worse to come.
Sorry.
why aren't the drones dropping supplies instead of bombs?
Re the thread which suggests that the number of comments posted about an article is a fair measure of the level of compassion and concern about the issue/events --(starvation in Niger, flood aftermaths in Pakistan specifically mentioned). Take heart. There's no logical connection between the stats of comment posting and degrees of humanity, awareness, progressive action, etc.
How sad, America spends the lion share of U.S. taxpayers money on efficient, hi tech, toxic, horrible weapons that keep on killing long after they are used in war to save Americans from an abstract enemy. In the meantime Americans and Pakistanis and millions of others are dying from the real natural enemies of floods, disease, starvation ect. Terrorist might attack America again in the future if we don't kill them all but that is an abstract theory and killing them all is impossible. America cannot kill them all. The terrorist might of learned their lesson and if left alone they will not attack again.Stop wasting all that blood and money on abstract theories regarding what will happen if we don't keep killing and killing. Natural disasters are the real enemy of terrorist and militants alike, who are killing each other.Floods are a tangible enemy of all humans. How can, God or Allah fearing people, believe that their creator demands that they fight each other instead of saving each other from natural disasters? Blasphemy!
blasphemy...........i like that word. it depicts the sentiments of religious people who degrade their following by attributing their acts/actions to their god ...........
abstract also is a good word to denote the intentions of other peoples..........
we cannot know the intentions of all peoples on earth, whatever their religion or nationality.................
likewise, the (abstract) intentions of nature are something we cannot predict. and nature is something we cannot reason with..........
why can we not all pool our resources to combat the devastation nature wreaks? and forget our religious divisions?................
we failed them
the west failed the relief effort and it is western excess which has caused climate change and rampant climactic extremes. It is the West which has enjoyed the longest periods of affluence to be unable to find solutions to such deprivation as Niger or haiti or pak. Technology to control crude oil ecocide, potable water filtration is unavailable. Never heard of hovercrafts, water purity tabs......
There is an added wrinkle to pak. The public spends more time debating the non-issue of the mosque at ground zero then the plight of the Gulf ecocide and economic displacement or the reality staring at us in pak. We can rain Drone missiles (sorry with no potable water bombs, not even a f#@8 water park squirt gun) because sympathy fatigue for all moslems. The media plants regular stories viciously suggesting the war is (wink wink) against the moslems. Who benefits India's (imagine the economic deprivation there) sniveling elite class or their cousins the Zionist media machine.
Sympathy comes to those who can evade the propaganda slavery
good points................