BALAKOT, Oct 16: Thousands of people risk death from cold and disease in the mountains of northern Pakistan as villages ravaged by a massive earthquake desperately need shelter, doctors said on Sunday.
“It’s absolutely urgent right now to send tents to give people shelter. If nothing is done there will be thousands of deaths in mountain villages in the devastated Balakot area,” said Thierry Velu, head of the French aid organization Groupe de Secours Catastrophe Francais.
The group, which has spent four days in Balakot, includes a medical unit working with the Pakistani army that found “around a hundred serious cases,” Velu told AFP.
Survivors who went days without care for fractured bones, now include “several cases of pneumonia and some serious infections that are going to require amputations,” he said.
A Pakistani military doctor also expressed alarm about the health situation in Balakot, a region in the North West Frontier Province.
“I don’t think that many of the people are going to survive the cold,” said the doctor, who identified himself as Bilal. He said the number of lives at risk was in the thousands.
“We’ve seen cases of diarrhoea, fever and respiratory infections appearing in recent days,” he said.
The October 8 earthquake, which registered 7.6 on the Richter scale, killed more than 38,000 people in Pakistan and more than 1,300 people in India. In Pakistan alone, more than 3.3 million people are homeless.
In another area, the Neelum Valley, doctor Sean Keogh of Britain-based Medical Relief International said on Saturday that several thousand people could die in the next few days if help does not reach their isolated villages.
In isolated villages, residents say that even if aid is coming, it is often haphazard and lacking tents — which will be crucial as snow has already fallen on the high mountains.
In the village of Jabori on the foothills of the mountains, the Pakistani army is distributing aid but villagers say what they sorely need is shelter.
The village in the depths of a scenic valley layered with farmland and pine trees is still partly intact, unlike Balakot which was almost entirely destroyed.
But also unlike Balakot, the village has not seen the same rush of aid coming from the outside.
“We didn’t have anything, no medicine, to care for the injured. We carried them down on stretchers to the hospital and then we waited,” Mohammed Sabir, a bearded 60-year-old, said with resignation in the ruins of his house.
Mohammad Farooq, 21, said his family of 13 has nowhere to go.
“I don’t need food. All I need is a tent. It’s raining, soon it’s going to snow, and people are living outside,” he said.
Thousands of people line up for the supplies being handed out by the Pakistani army, but they say it is inadequate.—AFP
