PESHAWAR, Nov 25: The World Health Organization has planned to develop an emergency preparedness programme for the NWFP and Balochistan to cope with disasters, official said.

"The NWFP along with Fata and Balochistan are prone to emergencies and disasters because of their peculiar culture and traditions and its strategic location with Afghanistan," said Dr Quaid Saeed, WHO emergency medical officer, while talking to Dawn.

He said that problems in the two provinces had been further aggravated by poverty, strict tribal traditions, lawlessness and low literacy rate. He added that the emergency management unit of the WHO had developed a three tier - short, medium and long-term - plan for increasing the capacity of the two provinces to prepare and respond to emergencies in future.

He said that four 2-day workshops in both the NWFP and Balochistan had been planned to impart training to health professionals in coping with emergencies. Districts and tribal areas to be selected for the workshops would be those which had experienced emergencies, road traffic accidents and natural disasters in the past.

Likewise, a disease surveillance system would be put in place to detect epidemic disease outbreaks, he added.