Immunisation race starts in quake-hit areas

Doctors in quake-stricken areas have begun a campaign to immunise 800,000 children against potentially killer diseases before the bitter Himalayan winter.
Immunisation will be against measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio. Children living in remote mountain villages, cut off by landslides, were particularly vulnerable due to malnutrition.
"We're doing everything we can to immunise every child in the region," Dr Tamur Mueenuddin, in charge of health issues for Unicef in Muzaffarabad, told Reuters on Sunday.
"The target is to immunise 800,000 children. We want to vaccinate them in the next two weeks', weather permitting, before people get into close quarters in camps."
The campaign was led by health authorities, and while an immunisation programme for measles, with a Vitamin A supplement, had already been under way it was decided to accelerate efforts, both in Azad Kashmir and the NFWP.
Dr Gulshan Rasheed, Assistant Project Officer, said the drive would cost five million rupees, and the expense was largely being borne by Unicef with help from the United Arab Emirates government.
Mueenuddin said one 15-strong medical team had been flown by helicopter into the cut off valleys around Muzaffarabad, and others were following.
"The plan is that they will reside there for a few days, and then walk from village to village, vaccinating every child they come across."
There is already growing alarm over the lack of sanitation in some of the squalid tent camps that sprang up spontaneously in Muzaffarabad, and the authorities are seeking to shift reluctant families to better organised encampments elsewhere in the city.
The World Health Organisation is awaiting test results from samples taken from sufferers of acute watery diarrhoea, to see if cholera has broken out.
At least 300 cases of acute diarrhoea were reported from one camp alone last week. There are some two dozen encampments in and around Muzaffarabad, according to officials.
Mueenuddin said there had been few cases of diphtheria, and several tetanus cases so far, along with 40 possible, or presumed cases of measles.