WASHINGTON, Sept 4: A top US federal official admitted for the first time on Sunday that thousands of people died in the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the southern United States.

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt told CNN television he had no death toll but said: “I think it’s evident it’s in the thousands.” Senators and local officials have already said thousands of people were killed by Hurricane Katrina last Monday and its chaotic aftermath. But the authorities have refused to give an official toll.

Leavitt acknowledged a case of dysentery in Mississippi and warned of the growing danger of disease epidemics.

Media reports said the dysentery had been confirmed in Biloxi, Mississippi and that an emergency shelter in the Gulf Coast port had been closed.

“I’ve received a report that they’re having to make some changes in the configuration because of an outbreak,” Leavitt said when asked about the reports.

“Public health officials and doctors tell me that we have the ingredients for a bad situation there,” he added.

“We’ve certainly seen a lot of sick people. We’re seeing a substantially higher percentage of those coming out of these centres who need serious medical care than one would normally see in this kind of a setting,” the secretary said.

Meanwhile, New Orleans began the gruesome task of collecting its thousands of dead on Sunday as the Bush administration tried to save face after its botched rescue plans left the city at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina.

Except for rescue workers and scattered groups of people, streets in the once-vibrant capital of jazz and good times were all but abandoned after a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighbouring Texas and other states.

Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger: “We have been abandoned by our own country, “ Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC’s Meet the Press.

“It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans,” Broussard said. “Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.”

After a nightmare confluence of natural disaster and political ineptitute that Al Qaeda-linked websites called evidence of the “wrath of God” striking America, National Guard troops and US marshals patrolled the city, stricken in the days after the hurricane by anarchic violence and looting.

Local and federal officials said they expected to find thousands of corpses still floating in flood waters or locked inside homes and buildings destroyed by the devastating storm that struck the US Gulf coast last Monday.

“When we remove the water from New Orleans, we’re going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood. People whose remains will be found in the street,” US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Fox News.

“There’ll be pollution. It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine.”

Later, Chertoff flew into New Orleans and said the search for storm victims would be arduous. “Let me be clear: we’re going to have to go house to house in this city,” he said. “This is not going to happen overnight.”

President George W. Bush, who in a rare admission of error, conceded on Friday that the results of his administration’s relief efforts were unacceptable, said on Saturday he would send 7,200 more active-duty troops over three days.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld toured a medical facility at New Orleans’ international airport on Sunday. He spoke and shook hands with military and rescue officials but walked right by a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was touring the Mobile, Alabama, area, in her native state.

A further 10,000 National Guard troops were being sent to storm-hit Louisiana and Mississippi, raising the total to 40,000. A total of 54,000 military personnel are now committed to relief efforts.

Lawmakers promised to allocate more relief money in coming weeks after Bush signed a $10.5 billion aid package for Gulf Coast areas hit by Katrina.

Towns along the Gulf Coast ripped apart by Katrina were beginning the enormous task of reconstruction and accounting for the dead.—AFP