Doctors yesterday launched a two-week campaign to immunize 800,000 children among quake victims in divided Kashmir following concerns that infectious disease could thrive in the crowded and sometimes squalid tent camps for survivors.
The UN and Pakistani health officials spearheading the drive in Pakistan's portion of Kashmir are racing to protect children before the region's savage winter strikes, starting in the most remote towns hit by the Oct. 8 quake and working their way toward the region's larger hubs.
"Now, the mourning period is over and everybody is ready to move forward to make sure that those who carry the future will be protected," Edward Hoekstra, a senior health adviser for UNICEF, said in the Pakistan Kashmir hub of Muzaffarabad, where fresh snow dusted nearby Himalayan peaks.
"We are starting in the most inaccessible areas in case the weather turns bad in the next two weeks," he said.
The region's 7.6-magnitude quake destroyed homes of more than 3 million people, and aid agencies have been busy distributing tents for survivors descending from remote, high-elevation settlements to seek shelter in regional hubs.
UN officials do not currently have an estimate of how many people lack shelter ahead of winter, but fear that thousands more survivors will come down from Himalayan peaks in coming weeks and that aid agencies will lack resources to shelter them, said Rashid Khalikov, UN coordinator of relief efforts in the quake zone.
"There's a still a big risk that a lot of people could die this winter," Khalikov said. "We will never know how many will die. They will die silently in remote places."
The vaccination campaign by the UN children's agency and Pakistan's Health Ministry targets 800,000 children up to age 15 in Pakistani Kashmir with vaccines for diseases including measles, polio, diphtheria and tetanus, Hoekstra said.
The shots also will include vitamin A, which can reduce the mortality rate of respiratory illnesses expected to be rife in winter by up to 50 percent, he said.
A similar campaign was begun earlier in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province -- also devastated by the quake -- and, in all, the agencies plan to immunize 1.2 million children.
Pakistan and Indian also opened yesterday a third crossing through their disputed Kashmir frontier as part of limited cooperation between the fierce rivals since the quake.
But the event at the Nauseri-Teethwal crossing, where the Pakistani army built a steel suspension bridge for pedestrian traffic, involved only a ceremonial exchange of quake aid, and not the much-awaited plans to allow Kashmiri residents to cross to reunite with long-separated relatives.
Porters from either side walked across wooden planks laid upon the bridge over the Neelum River, bringing with them sacks of rice and blankets.
Plans to move survivors from one of the many camps that sprung up spontaneously and without proper sanitation since the quake sparked a protest on Friday by about 200 survivors in Muzaffarabad.
Police dispersed protesters with canes and rifle butts, injuring some of them.
But the camp, at the city's Jalalabad Garden park, was quiet yesterday after Pakistani police said they had no immediate intention of moving its residents.
The quake, centered in divided Kashmir, killed about 86,000 people in the Pakistan portion of the territory and another 1,350 in India. It destroyed bridges, roads and homes across a wide swath.
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