MORE THAN 500,000 were reported injured from Sunday's disaster across Asia. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have so far been unable to assess the total number of missing people.
"We have little hope, except for individual miracles," Jean-Marc Espalioux, chairman of the Accor hotel group, said of the search for thousands of tourists and locals missing from beach resorts of southern Thailand including 2,000 Scandinavians.
One of those rare miracles was the reunion on Wednesday of an 18-month-old Swedish toddler with his father.
TODDLER FOUND ALONE
Days after being found alone at a roadside on Thailand's resort island of Phuket, the boy's uncle spotted a photo of the scratched and mosquito-bitten toddler. On Wednesday, Hannes and his father, Marko Karkkainen met for the first time since the tragedy at a hospital where both were receiving treatment.
Trucks dumped more than 1,000 unidentified bloated bodies into open graves on Sumatra and the navy sent a flotilla of ships to remote parts of the island.
In India, the death toll rose to nearly 7,000. Not included are some 8,000 missing and feared dead on the remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, east of the mainland.
Sri Lanka put its toll at nearly 22,500. Thailand said it had more than 1,800 dead and a total of more than 300 were killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Somalia, Tanzania and Kenya.
THREAT OF CHOLERA, MALARIA
Aid groups struggled to head off the threat of cholera and malaria epidemics that could break out where water supplies are polluted with bodies and debris.
Four planes arrived in the Sri Lankan capital, bringing a mobile surgical hospital from Finland, a water purification plant from Germany, doctors and medicine from Japan and aid workers from Britain, the Red Cross said.
Supplies that included 175 tons of rice and 100 doctors reached Sumatra's Banda Aceh. But with aid not arriving quickly enough, desperate people in towns across Sumatra stole whatever food they could find, officials said.
