Clean water 'a priority' for cyclone survivors

Lack of clean water will be the biggest killer in cyclone-hit Burma in the coming days, the international Red Cross warned today.

Hundreds of thousands of victims risk falling victim to diseases such as dysentery, the head of operations for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.

“If clean water isn’t available it’s going to be the biggest killer in the post-disaster environment,” said Thomas Gurtner.

“Food is urgent, but you die in three days from acute diarrhoea, you die of starvation in a period of weeks, he said. ”Seeing that the magnitude is so big, when you prioritise … the immediate life savers are water and shelter.“

Foreign aid organisations and media reports have estimated a far higher death toll than that given by the military government.

“The issue for us is not so much the death toll, the issue for us is much more those living who are now basically heading toward destitution,” Mr Gurtner said. “We need to focus on those figures, and get those figures in an accurate way.”

Aid agencies have been able to reach only around 20 to 30% of the cyclone victims so far, Mr Gurtner said.

He expressed concern that the 27,000 volunteers of the Burma Red Cross Society are already stretched to the limit delivering much of the aid across the storm-stricken country.

“To be able to provide clean water to hundreds of thousands of people stranded in the (Irrawaddy) delta requires a major operation which we have neither the material, the logistical nor the staff capacity to do,” he said.

At the moment IFRC has enough water purification equipment in the country or on its way to meet the needs of 100,000 people, he said, but much of it has not yet reached the affected areas.

“We’re hopeful that we should have some of this material deployed in the coming days,” Mr Gurtner said.

But he warned that distribution would be slow unless other aid groups were able to enter the vast, low-lying delta region hardest hit by the storm.

“If the Burma Red Cross remains the only agent that can move out it is going to be a problem. It is one of the only agencies that has been able to distribute extensively,” Mr Gurtner said.

IFRC has been sending 4-5 aid flights to Yangon every day and has been able to store the incoming supplies at warehouses run by the Burma Red Crescent, he said.

“We can receive the goods on our own,” Mr Gurtner said, adding that the federation has 180 tons of aid material in the country.