Rabies fear as stray dogs roam Kabul

Hundreds of rabid dogs are roaming the streets of Afghanistan’s war-wounded capital, a Taliban official said today but there is no vaccine for the three or four people who report to hospitals with dog bites every day.

Most of them are children who try to play with the dogs, said Health Minister Mullah Abbas Akhund.

In Kabul, night brings a cacophony of barking, howling dogs. When the city prepares for the nightly air raids by US jets searching out military targets, the only sounds in the blackened capital are the howling and barking of street dogs.

People in the devoutly Muslim country rarely keep dogs as pets because their religion frowns on them as dirty.

‘‘Children are dying in our hospitals because we have no vaccines,’’ Akhund said.

"Yesterday we had several cases of rabies that came to the hospital. We had nowhere to send them. If we don’t get vaccines they will be dead in three or four days.’’

The lack of vaccines is just one in a long list of complaints by the Taliban’s health minister - no medicines, no cold storage facilities, no transportation, no laboratories.

Akhund called the news conference to condemn the US-British air campaign, now into its fourth week.

‘‘If this goes on for another one month, the children will have mental problems. At night I hug my son to my chest and my wife, because all night they are crying,’’ said Najibullah Masoomyar, chief of the health ministry’s sanitation department.

He was at the news conference to complain about the lack of clean drinking water which he blamed on the nightly air raids. He said that the sanitation department has been unable to work because it is located in Kabul’s northern Khair Khana neighbourhood where the sewage is treated and dumped.

‘‘But the trucks can’t go out there because of the bombardment. They are afraid,’’ he said.

There have been several assaults on the northern neighbourhood, by jets searching out Taliban military positions as well as its front line positions with the northern alliance.

At the news conference in Akhund’s spacious office, whose windows were crisscrossed with tape to protect against shattering in the case of an air raid, Dr Mohammed Waziri said some of the victims of the bombing had strange symptoms he blamed on chemical weapons he claimed were being used by allied forces.

The Pentagon says such weapons are not being used in Afghanistan.

Waziri said three patients came into the hospital with only minor injuries but developed respiratory problems. Their lungs could not take in oxygen, they began to spit blood and later died.

‘‘For sure we don’t know what it was. We do not have the facilities to conduct tests,’’ he said.

Akhund laughed at the suggestion that samples be sent to a neighbouring country.

‘‘Our borders are sealed. There is no one who will help us. Who should we send a sample to? Pakistan?’’ asked Akhund. ‘‘They have joined against us. they are not our friends.’’

He also scoffed at suggestions that the United Nations or independent international observers be invited to Afghanistan to carry out tests.

‘‘The United Nations is not neutral. It is always talking about a government that will replace the Taliban government. How can we trust what they say’’?’’ Akhund asked, fingering his Islamic prayer beads and gesturing as he spoke from the head of a long table.

Akhund said the Organization of the Islamic Conference, (OIC) made up of more than 50 Muslim nations, had been invited to Afghanistan but so far had declined.

‘‘It is a big betrayal,’’ he said.