Fears of disease after Indian floods

Doctors and medical equipment were being rushed to flood-devastated northern India today in hopes of preventing disease spreading among the hundreds of thousands of victims crowding into refugee camps.

Nearly half of the 1.2 million people who were left homeless when the Kosi River burst its banks two weeks ago had been rescued by today, and officials hope to reach the others in the next three days.

About 250,000 refugees were in government and relief agency camps, said Prataya Amrit, a top disaster management official in Bihar state, the scene of the flooding. The rest are with family or friends.

But with the numbers in the camps expected to nearly double in the coming days, there were fears the crowded and often unsanitary conditions could lead to outbreaks of diseases such as cholera.

A United Nations statement warned that “the heat, combined with limited supplies of safe drinking water and poor hygiene conditions, poses a great risk of water and vector-borne diseases.”

In one camp set up at a school in Saharsa district – one of the worst hit of the five flooded districts in Bihar – a nurse was trying to treat the sick armed with just one packet of paracetamol tablets.

Unicef, the UN agency that focuses on children’s’ welfare, said the government was doing a good job getting food to the camps and bringing in doctors.

“In some of the mega camps being built there is adequate sanitation, but those are not yet complete,” said Mani Kumar, an emergency specialist with the agency.

“We are monitoring the situation for outbreaks and are ready to rush in,” he said.

Adding to their troubles, the flood waters continued to rise, inundating some camps and cutting off access to others, particularly in the Supaul district near the border with Nepal.

Officials say the flooding is expected to continue until November when the last of the monsoon rains taper off. Only then will they be able to plug a breach in the Kosi River that is more than a mile wide and growing.

The river, which flows down from the Himalayas into India where it joins the Ganges River, dramatically changed course after the breach, moving dozens of miles to the east and turning hundreds of square miles of land into a virtual lake.

Officials do not yet have a precise tally of those killed, but estimates of the dead range from scores to thousands.