Quake survivors finally get help

MUZAFFARABAD—Nearly six weeks after Pakistan’s killer earthquake, people with untreated injuries are still being brought down from remote mountain settlements.
A villager trekked out of the mountains to the east of Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, this week and told an aid group that people were still lying injured in three tiny, remote settlements. The group passed on the information to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is operating nine helicopters as part of efforts to help survivors.
“We took the helicopter out and with a lot of difficulty we found these places and we brought back nine people with fractures that had not been treated at all since the earthquake,” ICRC spokeswoman Jessica Barry said on Tuesday. Three of the injured rescued on Monday were girls — aged three, five and 10 — and the other six were adults, three of them over 70, she said.
“There were also some people there with infected wounds who our medic treated on the spot,” she said. The Oct. 8 earthquake killed more than 73,000 people in northern Pakistan and seriously injured tens of thousands more, most of them in Pakistani Kashmir.
A cash-strapped international aid effort is trying to ensure that more than 2 million survivors get enough food and shelter to see them through a bitter Himalayan winter that is about to grip the region. But aid officials warn that time is running out and many more people could die. Some hard-hit areas are still cut off by landslides triggered by the quake that swept away roads. No one knows how many people are still stranded in the mountains without help.
The United Nations had been hoping to launch an airlift on Tuesday with three British Chinook helicopters. The helicopters will take nearly 1,000 tonnes of food and shelter into the Neelum Valley, northeast of Muzaffarabad, where about 150,000 people are cut off with their sole road link gone. But the six-day operation was postponed for a day because of mechanical problems, U.N. officials said.
While the United Nations is trying to get supplies up to high-altitude settlements, a stream of people is heading down to the valleys where tent camps have sprung up and sickness is spreading. One camp in Muzaffarabad has had more than 500 cases of acute watery diarrhoea in the past week and aid workers are scrambling to improve sanitation.
It was a similar story in North West Frontier Province, at the northern end of the quake zone. “So far it’s not an epidemic, but every day we receive cases of diarrhoea, old and young,” army doctor Bilal Shah told Reuters in Balakot, one of the province’s worst-hit towns.
“This may be due to lack of access to clean water, and others have no education about hygiene. “There are some cases of chest infections with pneumonia, also severe cases, mostly with children up to three to four years.”
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is due to meet aid donors in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Saturday to assess how the world can help as the scale of the disaster becomes clearer. Donors have given only a fraction of the $550 million the United Nations asked for, just for a six-month emergency operation over the winter. Aid officials say the world must not ignore a second looming disaster.
“It would be really important if this conference provided an opportunity, as well as focusing on reconstruction, to remind people of the seriousness and enormity of the task ahead of us,” said senior U.N. official Pat Duggan.—Agencies