Fears Over Disease Mount in Flood-Ravaged Pakistan

(Aug. 2) -- The worst flooding in northwest Pakistan for 80 years is now believed to have killed at least 1,220 people, many dying as their villages were swept away, and left more than 1 million people homeless and in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

"We have recorded 1,227 dead so far and this will increase" to as high as 3,000, Mujahid Khan, a spokesman for Pakistan's independent Edhi ambulance service in the northwest city of Peshawar told Bloomberg. "We can see people drowning but we can't go into the water because of its high pressure. The relief efforts of everyone combined is only 5 percent of what's required."

And fears are mounting that the death toll will climb far higher as disease spreads among the survivors of this weeklong deluge. Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister of Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa province, one of the worst-hit regions, told Agence France-Presse that he had received "confirmation of reports about an outbreak of cholera in some areas" of the Swat Valley, which borders Afghanistan.

Shariyar Khan Bangash, Peshawar-based regional program manager for aid organization World Vision, said in a BBC interview that survivors in the worst-affected areas were pleading for clean drinking water.

"These people were saying: 'We don't need food at this time but we need drinking water.' All the wells which are providing water for them are full of mud, and you cannot use those wells," he said. "Among the children, the diarrhea has started already and cholera. That's the main risk at this time. Food shortages are already there."

The true scale of the disaster only became clear in the past 24 hours, when the furious monsoon rains slowed. "Aerial monitoring is being conducted, and it has shown that whole villages have washed away, animals have drowned and grain [stores] have washed away," Latifur Rehman, a spokesman for the provincial disaster management authority, told The Associated Press. "The destruction is massive." That devastation is especially hard felt in the Swat Valley, where locals are still trying to rebuild homes and businesses wrecked by fighting between Taliban militants and the army last spring, when nearly 2 million were forced to abandon their homes.

"We saw destruction during the three years of the Taliban and then during their fight with the army," Fazal Maula, a resident of Imam Dheri village, told the AP. "But the destruction we have seen in the last three days is much more."

Pakistan's military has committed some 30,000 troops and dozens of helicopters to the relief effort, and says it has rescued 28,000 people in recent days. But public anger is mounting over the response, as the overwhelming size of the natural disaster has left many displaced people feeling like authorities are doing little to help. On Sunday, more than 300 people attended a rally in Peshawar to condemn the provincial government for failing to provide adequate shelter.

"I had built a two-room house on the outskirts of Peshawar with my hard-earned money but I lost it in the floods," 53-year-old laborer Ejaz Khan told AFP. "The government is not helping us. ... The school building where I sheltered is packed with people, with no adequate arrangement for food and medicine."

This torrent of anger is especially worrying for local authorities, who are competing with Islamist movements to deliver aid in a region strongly connected with the Pakistani Taliban. The AP noted that representatives of a charity allegedly linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) militant group -- accused of carrying out the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, that left 166 people dead, and of being heavily involved in the Afghan insurgency -- were seen distributing food and offering medical services Sunday to victims in the town of Charsada.

Previous natural disasters have shown how radical Islamist groups can use these tragedies to boost their standing with locals. When a catastrophic earthquake hit Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 2005, killing 80,000 people, militants were among the first on the scene with food and blankets. The government of then-President Pervez Musharraf, meanwhile, was slammed for its sluggish response. "[Islamists] were the first ones there, and they were in the forefront," Pakistan Human Rights Commission Chairman Asma Jehangir told Voice of America two months after the quake. "People had rightly praised them that they were there when we needed them. And they asked the question, where was our military? Where was our government?"

In an attempt to dampen a similar upswell of anti-government feeling, the U.S. and U.N. this weekend pledged $10 million each in emergency aid to Pakistani authorities. America has also provided rescue boats, water filtration units, 12 temporary steel bridges designed to replace damaged crossings and some 50,000 packaged meals that Pakistani soldiers have been distributing by helicopter. "The Pakistani people are friends and partners," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a statement, "and the United States is standing with them as the tragic human toll mounts from flooding in northwest Pakistan."

Pakistan will almost certainly need more assistance soon, as the country's meteorological service is forecasting downpours of up to 8 inches across the northwest in the next two weeks.