Children, women prone to diseases in stagnant flood water

KARACHI: Children and women are becoming more vulnerable as tens of thousands of people suffer from infectious and water-borne diseases, and the death toll from the inundation surpassed 1,500, according to government data and UNICEF.

As flood waters begin to recede, which officials say may take two to six months, the regions have become infested with diseases including malaria, dengue fever, diarrhoea and skin problems, the Sindh government said in a report on Friday.

“Stagnant water is giving rise to water-borne diseases,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in an address to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. “Millions of people are living under the open sky.”

Women and children — mostly malnourished and in poor health in rural regions — are particularly vulnerable.

The Sindh report said more than 90,000 people were treated on Thursday alone in the province, which has been the hardest hit by the cataclysmic floods.

It confirmed 588 malaria cases with another 10,604 suspected cases, in addition to the 17,977 diarrhoea and 20,064 skin disease cases reported on Thursday. Some 2.3 million patients have been treated since July 1 in the field and mobile hospitals in the flooded region.

Three other three provinces also reported tens of thousands of patients visiting make-shift health facilities in flood-ravaged areas, officials said, noting acute respiratory problems, skin diseases such as scabies, eye infections and typhoid.

“They don’t have specialists and medicines,” a northwestern resident Ali Haider told Reuters by phone.

A government report in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province acknowledged the complaints, stating that providing medicines and supplies remained a challenge.

“We’re worried about the malaria spread,” said Noor Ahmad Qazi, director of general health services in southwestern Balochistan province, told Reuters. A health emergency has been declared in the province, he noted.

ECONOMIC LOSSES

Record monsoon rains in the south and southwest parts of the country and glacial melt in northern areas triggered the flooding that has affected nearly 33 million people in the nation of 220 million, sweeping away homes, crops, bridges, roads and livestock and causing an estimated $30 billion of damage.

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