U.N. Pushes For More Quake Aid

Quake-ravaged Pakistan is facing a second catastrophe and a new wave of deaths if the world does not come forward to help survivors of the Oct. 8 earthquake before winter sets in, aid officials said Wednesday.

The warning came as the United Nations appealed for nearly double what it previously sought from donor nations gathering Wednesday in Geneva to raise money for victims of the temblor, which is believed to have killed nearly 80,000 people, most in the high Himalayan mountains of northern Pakistan.

Jan Egeland, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said before the meeting that millions of lives were at risk, an apparent reference to the 3.3 million people left homeless by the 7.6-magnitude quake.

"Catastrophe looms large," said Rashid Khalikov, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in this destroyed city. "The danger is there that the loss of life would be very high if the required help does not reach them" before winter.

Pakistan's government raised the official death toll to 54,197 on Wednesday, with 78,000 injured. Central government figures have consistently lagged behind those by local officials, which put the death toll in Pakistan at about 78,000. A further 1,350 people died in Indian-held Kashmir.

Temperatures are already dipping below freezing in some areas of the mountainous north, and the weather is expected to worsen in coming weeks, cutting off remote valleys where some 800,000 people are believed to lack any shelter whatsoever.

Khalikov told The Associated Press the cold is already taking its toll on survivors, with winter still weeks off.

"What we have already in our hands is dramatic increases in respiratory diseases. There are a lot more cases of pneumonia, bronchitis and other kinds of diseases that happen when people are exposed to the cold," he said.

Aid workers have just five weeks to get six months' worth of food supplies into the most remote areas of Pakistan before they are cut off, according to the U.N. World Food Program.

"We are racing against time. We need to win the race before snow falls," said Simon Missiri, head of the Asia and Pacific operation of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

"We need more resources to save 2 million to 3 million lives and we need much more resources in the next few days," Egeland said hours before the donor meeting. The U.N. is now asking for $549.6 million, up from the $312 million it initially called for.

Despite the fresh warnings, the United Nations has said it has received less than 30 percent of the $312 million it initially requested. Pakistan has said rebuilding the area will cost $5 billion.

On Tuesday, the European Union proposed that member nations come up with another $96 million, on top of the $16.3 million already dispensed to Pakistan for emergency disaster release.

The donors meeting in Geneva comes as aftershocks continue to rattle the region. A magnitude-5.2 aftershock shook Islamabad, the northwestern city of Peshawar and the quake-hit town of Mansehra on Wednesday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

Fear of the spread of disease is also very real.

In the quake-devastated town of Bagh, a town about 40 miles southwest of Muzaffarabad, a patient fell ill with a suspected case of hemorrhagic fever, an aid official said Wednesday.

Krist Teirlinck, of the aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said the patient was in an isolation tent on the grounds of Bagh's destroyed district hospital, in case the fever was contagious.

He would give no details about the patient or symptoms. He also said it was unclear if the earthquake had played any role in the illness.

Hemorrhagic fevers, which include such illnesses as Ebola and Marburg, are characterized by a sudden onset, fever, aching, bleeding in internal organs and shock. Earlier, several dozen quake victims came down with tetanus, and at least three of them died.
A MASH unit with U.S. Army surgeons that arrived this week got into full swing Wednesday, treating a steady stream of patients, including an operation on a 20-year-old woman with a broken leg.

The 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, based near Ramstein, Germany, arrived in Muzaffarabad on Monday with more than 130 staff, equipment and blood after a series of setbacks, including delays caused by a shortage of aircraft and breakdowns on the winding, narrow roads of the northern Pakistan. The fifth MASH unit in the ravaged city, it treated 35 patients by Wednesday afternoon.

In Muzaffarabad on Wednesday, the prime minister of Pakistan's portion of Kashmir, Sikandar Hayat Khan, urged India to accept President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's proposals for opening up the so-called Line of Control that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

The two nations have dueling proposals to bring help to quake victims living along the line. But seemingly genuine attempts to reach across the divide are analyzed for their potential propaganda value, with one-upmanship and mistrust threatening to scuttle the tentative steps to move the peace process forward.

Pakistan's "suspicions of Indian malevolence have receded" in the quake's aftermath, said G. Parthasarthy, a former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan.

"If there are very deep suspicions, disaster can mitigate those suspicions to a certain extent," he said. "But gut reactions don't change so easily."

Or, as Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf bluntly told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Friday: "If they don't trust me, I don't trust them ... It's mutual."

The mistrust was clear when Pakistan initially hesitated before accepting tents and other vital supplies from India soon after the Oct. 8 quake, which killed 79,000 people, the vast majority in Pakistan. Some 1,360 died in India.

Since then, however, a seemingly endless back-and-forth between the neighbors has produced little.

"The proposal was not for any military purpose but totally for humanitarian help," Khan said at a ceremony where he gave compensation payments to relatives of those who died in the quake. Families are given about $1,700 for each person who died.

Geologists, meanwhile, found no sign of volcanic activity after surveying the quake-hit Alai Valley, where residents had reported a possible eruption, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said. Officials said earlier that the villagers could have mistaken the sounds of aftershocks and the dirt clouds from landslides as an eruption.