Worsening weather has severely hampered aid efforts in earthquake-ravaged northern Pakistan, underscoring the need to get urgent relief to shivering survivors before focusing on reconstruction, a UN official said yesterday.
Helicopters were carrying aid after being grounded on Sunday and much of Monday by bad weather that claimed the life of an infant with pneumonia -- the first reported victim of what officials fear will be a new wave of deaths brought on by the Himalayan winter.
While snow fell on mountains in the quake zone, Pakistan army spokesman Major Farooq Nasir said helicopters were ferrying relief to remote highlands and valleys.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Pakistan said "the onset of winter conditions ... has severely hampered the relief operations of the UN and other humanitarian organizations," grounding some helicopters and thwarting some road deliveries.
"This development shows why it is very important for us to do more -- and quickly, too -- as we keep the focus on the relief phase," an agency statement quoted UN Emergency Operations Chief Andrew MacLoed as saying.
He appealed for more relief funds. Donors have pledged more than US$6 billion, but much of it is meant for reconstruction. MacLoed said less than half of the US$550 million target for relief funds has been received.
"Winter and nature are reminding us: `Concentrate on relief in order to save more lives, reconstruct later,'" he said, reflecting fears of a new wave of deaths after the Oct. 8 quake that killed more than 87,000 people.
The quake also left some 3.5 million homeless in Pakistan. Aid agencies and the military have been struggling to provide shelter to survivors living at high altitudes.
"Many thousands of people are still without shelter." Air Commodore Andrew Walton, commander of the NATO disaster response team, said on Monday.
In the coming weeks, he said, NATO plans to start using helicopters that have been hauling aid to the quake zone to carry shelter materials into the high mountains "before the winter really bites" and take medical teams to inaccessible areas.
A middle-aged man with terminal cancer died on Monday after he was taken to the hospital with hypothermia, officials said. They attributed the death to cancer but said more hypothermia cases are likely as temperatures drop.
UN official Elisabeth Byrs said that of the 500,000 tents the UN purchased and stockpiled for quake relief, about 165,000 have yet to be delivered, adding that stoves and corrugated iron sheeting are also urgently needed.
"The race to provide suitable shelter in time is not lost yet, but the consequences resulting from a lack of funds could result in more deaths of vulnerable people," said Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva.
Three-month-old Waqar Mukhtar died on Monday of pneumonia just hours after he was brought to a hospital in Muzaffarabad, said Abdul Hamid.
Another doctor here, Mohammed Shoaib, said yesterday that about 100 patients, brought to hospitals with hypothermia and weather-related ailments after a weekend snowfall, were recovering. But he was concerned about people living in tents in cold, remote areas.
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