More tents and plastic sheets have been secured to help 4.6 million shelterless Pakistanis, a UN spokesman said on Saturday, easing pressure on aid workers hoping to stop diseases spreading in the country's flood crisis. Waters began raging through an area of Pakistan about the size of England some three weeks ago, ravaging crops, washing away villages, destroying roads and bridges and leaving millions homeless and penniless.
The crisis has also raised concerns about the stability of a government rendered even more unpopular by its slow response to the disaster in a country seen as strategic for the region and which is fighting a battle with Taliban insurgents. UN humanitarian operations spokesman Maurizio Giuliano said tents and plastic sheets had been delivered to one million people and now more were on the way for another 2.4 million.
"The good news is that we have been able to double the amount of tents and plastic sheets that are in the pipeline that are coming in," Giuliano told Reuters. Half a million people are living in about 5,000 schools, said Giuliano, where poor hygiene and sanitation, along with cramped quarters and the stifling heat, provide fertile ground for potentially fatal diseases such as cholera.
Isolated rains are expected in parts of central Punjab, southern Sindh and north-western Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa provinces in the next 24 hours, officials said. There are already over 38,000 cases of acute diarrhoea and at least one case of cholera has been confirmed. A major disease breakout would cause another crisis and impose new demands on already stretched humanitarian workers.
The official death toll is around 1,500 but the true number of people killed in the disaster may turn out to be higher, with large areas of the country still inaccessible, Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations said on Friday. Islamist charities have moved swiftly to fill the vacuum left by a government overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and struggling to reach millions of people in dire need of shelter, food and drinking water. Nato said on Friday it would provide ships and aircraft to transport aid to Pakistan, a day after Islamabad warned that militants were trying to exploit the disaster.
ECONOMY HARD HIT The United Nations has issued an appeal for $459 million of aid to help Pakistan, of which Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said about 60 percent had been pledged. The EU foreign affairs chief will also urge countries next month to support trade breaks for Pakistan as worries grow about the impact of the floods on the stability of a nation fighting its own battle against Islamists.
A statement from the Nato Western military alliance, which is battling Islamist militants in Pakistan's neighbour Afghanistan, said a Nato aircraft would fly in power generators, water pumps and tents donated by Slovakia on Sunday. A stable Pakistan is seen as key to ending the nine-year Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan.
Eight million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. About one-third of Pakistan has been hit by the floods, with waters stretching tens of miles (km) from rivers, and the economy is unlikely to reach its growth target this year, the Asian Development Bank said.