Colder weather and disease threaten Pakistanis displaced by floods
IRIN
27 September 2010 QUETTA – Inside their tent at a camp on the outskirts of Quetta, capital of the southwestern province of Balochistan, Meraj Sindhu helps his wife wrap their six-month-old son and two-year-old daughter in thin cloths widely used in Sindh Province as head scarves or turbans. Sindhu’s wife, Sassui Bibi, tells IRIN: “The children cry with cold through the night.” She, her husband, and her elderly mother-in-law huddle inside their tent trying to keep warm. Night-time temperatures in Quetta have dropped to around 12 degrees Celsius, according to the Pakistan Met Office, and dip to below freezing in mid-winter. “We are used to hot weather through most of the year, and besides we have none of the warm clothes we use during the winter,” said Sindhu, from Jacobabad District, Sindh. “It was blisteringly hot when we fled [the floods] in early August and we came away with just the light clothes on our backs,” he said. Sindhu and other displaced persons from Sindh say the wind that has begun blowing across Quetta as winter begins to set in, “adds to the feeling of bitter cold”. “We are used to extremes. In winters it is freezing, summers are hot and the cold, dry winds of winter have started here. Usually by October we need warm clothes and heating in rooms,” said Sadiq Jan, 60, a watchman engaged at the camp. “These unfortunate people are just not used to the conditions,” he said. Doctors are concerned about the health impact: “I have been receiving more patients – often those from Sindh – suffering upper respiratory tract infections, which may be linked to the change in weather,” Yusuf Khan, a general practitioner who works at a charitable clinic near a makeshift camp, told IRIN. “Cold weather, and the crowding which results, is associated with more opportunities for person-to-person transmission of respiratory pathogens. So although cold weather doesn’t in itself cause disease, it can increase the risk of transmission of certain communicable diseases such as ARIs, meningitis, measles, etc”, Paul Garwood, the World Health Organization’s communications officer, told IRIN. …
