South Asia Flood Victims Battle Waterborne Diseases

Tuesday, August 7th 2007, 9:01 pm

By: News On 6

LUCKNOW, India (AP) -- Aid workers scrambled to get food, water and medicine to the millions marooned in flood-hit South Asia, where children were likely to be the hardest hit by outbreaks of diarrhea and other waterborne diseases in northern India and Bangladesh, officials said Tuesday.

At least 376 people have died as a result of recent monsoons and floods in India and Bangladesh, including at least nine people who drowned when their boat sank Monday in India's northeastern Bihar state. Another 29 are missing, said N. Swaran Kumar, the district magistrate.

The U.N. Children's Fund warned in a statement that children are especially vulnerable to the ``looming health crisis.''

``Entire villages are days away from a health crisis if people are not reached in the coming days,'' Marzio Babille, UNICEF's health chief in India, said in the statement. ``Children, who make up 40 percent of South Asias population, are particularly susceptible.''

The threat of waterborne disease is high because wells have been contaminated by floodwaters, said L.B. Prasad, director-general of health in Uttar Pradesh state.

More than 1,000 people are reported sick, mainly from cholera and gastroenteritis in the Maharajganj, Gorakhpur and Bara Banki districts of India's northern Uttar Pradesh state, officials said.

UNICEF said millions of children were likely to be affected, but did not give a specific total. In Bihar, India's worst-hit state, the agency said stagnant waters had put about 11 million people, including 1.5 million children, at risk of contracting waterborne diseases.

In Bangladesh, there were 1,400 reported cases of diarrhea in the past 24 hours, said Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization.

The World Food Program and UNICEF have been distributing emergency food supplies to thousands of people in Bangladesh and Nepal, said WFP spokesman Simon Pluess in Geneva.

In India, UNICEF has provided oral rehydration and water purification tablets as well as emergency medical supplies, the agency said.

The Indian air force stepped up relief efforts, dropping supplies for 2 million people cut off by some of the worst flooding in Bihar in 30 years.

Authorities have been criticized for being too slow to respond to the crisis with too little aid.

Hundreds of angry villagers in the Darbhanga district of Bihar briefly kidnapped a senior official and the local police chief, only releasing them after receiving promises that an aid distribution center would be set up there, said Upendera Sharma, a local government official.

Since the start of the monsoon in June, the government says more than 1,200 people have died in India alone, with scores of others killed in Bangladesh and neighboring Nepal.

So far this year, some 14 million people in India and 5 million in Bangladesh have been displaced by flooding, according to government figures.

Officials have blamed the flooding on an unusual monsoon pattern, which UNICEF said called ``startling'' in magnitude and intensity.