Pakistan floods: A doctor writes (part 4)
Diary Four, Friday 13th August 2010
I’ve been in Pakistan three weeks and have been working with the Doctors Worldwide team a few days into this humanitarian disaster. If you ask me if anything has changed on the ground, I have to respond with honesty and say that things are taking a turn for the worse. The rain keeps on falling and the true magnitude of this disaster is becoming clearer minute-by-minute. Earlier I was with a doctor from an international medical organisation. He confirmed that there are cases of cholera in Sindh province and the reality is that if cholera has been found in Sindh then it will of course be found in other parts of this broken and devastated country. An area twice the size of my own country, Great Britain, continues to be affected by this disaster. Sadly, many of the people that I’ve met and come across have resigned themselves to thinking that this is as good as it gets. Three weeks on, international aid is still not reaching massive numbers of people. Nobody can pretend that its easy to get aid to the flooded areas but its also important to be honest and acknowledge the sheer scale of the problem so that the international community can deal with it head on. One international organisation told me today that they have yet to carry out a detailed health assessment on the ground, so far they have only carried out an assessment by helicopter which means that they have not spoken to any of the desperate flood survivors swamped in their villages below to understand the needs of survivors. I must confess I found this simply extraordinary. … According to some data collected by the UN that was shared with health workers an estimated 45,000 women are due to give birth across the flood affected areas between now and September. The UN estimates that at least 25,000 of those babies won’t survive because of the lack of healthcare facilities in the area and some due to the impact of the floods. …
