Lying on a blue plastic sheet in a makeshift, crowded hospital ward, Riyadh Islam, 4, cries out for water.
His grandmother, who has been watching the dehydrated child toss and turn in discomfort for hours, quickly gives him a drink from a steel cup and murmurs comforting words.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Islam, son of a motorized rickshaw driver, needs all the comfort he can get. He is one of tens of thousands of Bangladeshis suffering from severe diarrhea, the messy aftermath of the worst floods in this impoverished nation for 15 years.
Although the river levels have dropped in the past 10 days, the lack of clean drinking water in some waterlogged areas and the contamination of wells have led to a sharp spike in cases of waterborne diseases, particularly diarrhea.
Officials said yesterday that over 140,000 had fallen ill with diarrhea in the past four weeks and at least 70 had died. Most cases were reported this month as flood waters started to fall. Some newspapers put the death toll at around 150.
Across low-lying Bangladesh and eastern India, more than 1,720 people have died from drowning, snakebites and disease since the start of last month as annual monsoon rains caused rivers to overflow into densely populated areas.
In Bangladesh, the government has sent out more than 4,000 medical teams to contain the diarrhea outbreak and authorities said the situation was well under control.
But a visit to the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Re-search, Bangladesh -- famous for creating the Oral Rehydration Solution -- shows it is a tough battle.
Staff have used bamboo and tarpaulins to convert a parking lot and a reception area into temporary wards to deal with the rush.
Hundreds of diarrhea patients, mainly from teeming Dhaka slums particularly badly hit by the floods, lie on plastic sheets on rows of metal cots and wooden beds. Serious cases have saline drips attached to their hands.
More than half of the admissions are children.
Beds and sheets have a hole in them with a plastic funnel to take patients' waste to already partially filled buckets below. Liberal use of disinfectant cannot totally mask the fetid smell.
Lokman Hossain, a thin 6-year-old, looks scared as he lies with a saline needle stuck to his hand.
"He was in very bad condition for three days. His stool was like water and he is very weak," said Mohammad Firoz, a teenage cousin who is looking after him.
Asked how he is feeling, Hossain whispers: "I'm okay."
A tearful mother pleads with a harried nurse to attend to her semi-delirious child as more patients are wheeled in.
Research center spokesman Ishtiaque Zaman said the number of patients had soared since the beginning of the month as people in waterlogged areas with little or no sanitation started to fall ill.
"We have stopped research work and are just tending to patients," Zaman said.
With large areas of the country still submerged, the World Health Organization has forecast a further possible rise in waterborne diseases, pneumonia and skin and eye infections.
The doctors at the center have little time to talk.
"We are very, very busy," Anjan Das said, as he rushed to attend to a patient who had just been wheeled into the packed, 100m-long ward.
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on Friday after dissolving the Kosovar parliament said a snap election should be held as soon as possible to avoid another prolonged political crisis in the Balkan country at a time of global turmoil. Osmani said it is important for Kosovo to wrap up the upcoming election process and form functional institutions for political stability as the war rages in the Middle East. “Precisely because the geopolitical situation is that complex, it is important to finish this electoral process which is coming up,” she said. “It is very hard now to imagine what will happen next.” Kosovo, which declared
MORE BANS: Australia last year required sites to remove accounts held by under-16s, with a few countries pushing for similar action at an EU level and India considering its own ban Indonesia on Friday said it would ban social media access for children under 16, citing threats from online pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud and Internet addiction. “Accounts belonging to children under 16 on high-risk platforms will start to be deactivated, beginning with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox,” Indonesian Minister of Communications and Digital Meutya Hafid said. “The government is stepping in so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giants of the algorithm. Implementation will begin on March 28, 2026,” she said. The social media ban would be introduced in stages “until all platforms fulfill their
RSS