LONDON (AP):
Teams of medical experts from the United Nations and other international aid agencies were racing to get urgent medical care yesterday to people injured in the South Asia earthquake and to fix sanitation systems and drinking water supplies in an effort to ward off disease outbreaks.
Volunteer medical teams from around the world continued to rush to the quake zone to help out, but doctors and other public health experts from across Pakistan were also streaming into the area, the World Health Organisation said.
Treating injuries and preventing the life-threatening secondary infections that can result from them is probably the most immediate medical issue.
Early medical care can not only save the lives of people who would otherwise bleed to death from serious wounds, but it can also reduce the number of survivors left with permanent disabilities. Early medical attention can prevent gangrene, reduce the need for amputations and soften the toll from conditions such as tetanus, a life-threatening infection that comes from cuts from dirty debris.
The Geneva-based WHO said several field hospitals have sprung up in the days since the quake and that international agencies will be trying to coordinate the activities of these volunteer medical teams so that the tents are properly spread out and the right expertise gets to the right place.
Meanwhile, health experts are trying to determine how badly the country's hospital buildings have been hit.
"Some are standing, some are destroyed, but we are still assessing" what proportion of the hospitals are functional and how bad the damage is to the others, said Marko Kokic, spokesman for WHO's Health Action in Crises unit.
However, more chronic threats such as outbreaks of diarrhoeal diseases, pneumonia and measles are also a concern.
Dirty water is one of the biggest health issues. When drinking water supplies and sanitation systems break down in a natural disaster, the two often mix. Diarrhoeal diseases such as dysentery and cholera spread through faecal contaminated drinking water.
Cholera, one of the more serious diarrhoeal diseases, is endemic in the area, but the cold weather is expected to help reduce the chance of an outbreak, WHO spokeswoman Christine McNab said.
Health experts will be rushing to ensure clean drinking water and proper sanitation in an effort to head off such diseases.
Pneumonia is a worry in the quake zone because of the cold weather and because it spreads so easily in crowded places, McNab said.
Measles is also a concern because immunisation rates in the region are low and the virus is highly contagious and because it is particularly deadly to children when they are malnourished or their immune systems are depressed. WHO said a mass vaccination programme will start as soon as possible.
The World Food Programme said it started airlifting deliveries of high-energy nut-based crackers to feed 240,000 people and that it was prepared to feed one million people for a month.
The likelihood of epidemics of all these diseases increases when large numbers of people are crowded together, so they become a concern after natural disasters such as earthquakes if people congregate in shelters or refugee camps, where many people are sharing toilets, drinking taps and living space.
Some experts believe part of the reason that major disease outbreaks were averted in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami last year was that authorities made sure people gathered in small encampments instead of mega camps.
