UN fears cholera outbreak

2005-11-09 11:07

Muzaffarabad - Hundreds of earthquake victims in Pakistani Kashmir have acute diarrhoea and doctors are investigating whether they are cases of cholera, the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday.

"In one camp we visited yesterday there were 55 cases of diarrhoea and there are so many spontaneous camps that we believe there are hundreds of others," WHO worker Rachel Lavy said in Muzaffarabad, the regional capital.

"Acute watery diarrhoea fits very closely with the definition of cholera. That is one of the things it can be," Lavy said, adding however that there were other waterborne diseases that could cause similar types of diarrhoea.

"We are treating it as suspicious but we don't have laboratory guidance at this stage," she said.

Difficult to curb illness

Acute diarrhoea can kill if it is not treated aggressively and immediately, Lavy said.

"It can dehydrate an adult within a few hours," she added. "If you get watery diarrhoea you need to treat it aggressively with massive rehydration, isolation, ensuring clean water and sanitation to prevent contamination."

But she said curbing the spread of illness was especially difficult in the cramped conditions of the refugee camps that have sprung up in Muzaffarabad.

"The spontaneous camps are not set up by the government and are not organised so inevitably water and sanitation are not good," she said.

"Now we are going to visit as many of the camps as we can."

British charity Oxfam warned on Friday that the squalid conditions in the camps could kill thousands of people, far exceeding the toll in remote villages that have been the focus of aid efforts so far.

The October 8 earthquake is confirmed to have killed nearly 74 000 people in Pakistan and more than 1 300 in India. However humanitarian groups estimate the toll to be 86 000 in Pakistan.

- AFP