‘Burning with pain’: Pakistan floods threaten major health crisis

Editor — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 08:49:36 +0000

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SUKKUR: At a charity clinic in a southern Pakistani village, dozens of people affected by relentless rains and floods crowd around the door waiting to talk to a volunteer doctor.
The village of Bhambro is in a poor district of Sindh province, hard-hit by record floods that have destroyed more than a million homes and damaged critical infrastructure including health facilities across the country.
Bhambro is surrounded by vast stretches of flooded farmland, its streets full of mud and strewn with debris and manure — conditions ripe for outbreaks of malaria, cholera and skin diseases such as scabies.
“Skin diseases are the main problem here because of dirty, stagnant water and unhygienic conditions,” said Sajjad Memon, one of the doctors at the clinic, which is run by the charity Alkhidmat Foundation.
He used the flashlight on his mobile phone to examine patients, who were mostly reporting scabs and rashes on Tuesday.
Many had made their way to the clinic walking barefoot through filthy floodwater and mud.
“My child’s foot is burning with pain. My feet too,” said Azra Bhambro, a 23-year-old woman who had come to the clinic for help.
Abdul Aziz, a doctor in charge of Alkhidmat’s clinics in the area, told AFP that cases of scabies and fungal infections were on the rise.
Scabies outbreaks are common in crowded places with tropical conditions — such as flood relief camps and shelters — and can lead to severe itching and rashes, according to the World Health Organization.
Memon told AFP that many of the patients at the clinic could not afford to purchase shoes.
The millions of people affected by the floods face major health hazards including potentially deadly diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, the WHO warned in a statement Tuesday.
Sindh province, in Pakistan‘s south, has been hit particularly hard, with vast swathes of land under water and many villagers forced to head to large cities for shelter, food aid and medical assistance.
The health threat is even greater in areas such as Bhambro, where health services were already limited, and for the tens of thousands who are taking shelter in crowded relief camps.
“Ongoing disease outbreaks in Pakistan, including acute watery diarrhoea, dengue fever, malaria, polio, and Covid-19 are being further aggravated, particularly in camps and where water and sanitation facilities have been damaged,” the WHO said.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Floods wreak havoc across Pakistan, death toll is 1,061

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 02:18:31 +0000

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ISLAMABAD: The overall death toll from floods across Pakistan reached 1,061 on Monday while rising levels of the gushing Indus river threatened more deluges in the lower-lying plains of Punjab and Sindh provinces before emptying into the Arabian Sea.
Data released by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) stated that 1,600 people were injured and more than 719,000 livestock had perished.
The floods, according to NDMA, destroyed over 3,451 km of roads, 149 bridges, 170 shops, and 949,858 houses, and swept away villages, crops and orchards spread over thousands of acres.
Pakistan finance minister Miftah Ismail said the floods have inflicted an estimated “loss of at least $10 billion” on the country.
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, said in a video posted on Twitter that Pakistan is experiencing a “serious climate catastrophe, one of the hardest in the decade”.
“We are at the moment at ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events, and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking non-stop havoc throughout the country,” she said.
As experts blame climate change for the flooding, people are criticising government and local authorities for allowing builders to construct hotels and houses on the banks of rivers. “These hotels and markets block the natural waterways. Much of the devastation would have been avoided if we had not blocked the paths of rivers,” said Khaista Rehman, a resident of Kalam in Swat, where floods had wiped out most of the hotels and markets that had been built on the banks of the river.
“I haven’t seen destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put it into words … it is overwhelming,” Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari told foreign media, adding that many crops that provided much of the population’s livelihoods had been wiped out. “Going forward, I would expect not only the IMF, but the international community and international agencies to truly grasp the level of devastation,” he said.Flooding from the Swat river had affected northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where tens of thousands of people — especially in Charsadda and Nowshera districts — have been evacuated from their homes to relief camps set up in government buildings. Many have also taken shelter on roadsides, said Kamran Bangash, a spokesperson for the provincial government. Bangash said some 180,000 people have been evacuated from villages in Charsadda and 150,000 from Nowshera district villages.
The Swat river merges with the Kabul river in Charsadda and joins the Indus at a historical place where a military fort built by Mughal emperor Akbar, which had guarded the northwest of India after the 1560s until Partition, still stands.
The combined flow of the Jhelum, Ravi, Chenab, Beas and Sutlej rivers run southwest for approximately 71 km before joining the Indus at Mithankot, southern Punjab.
Millions of people await more misery as the Indus gushes towards the low-lying areas of Sindh and southern Punjab. The latest inflow and outflow levels of the Indus recorded at Chashma, Pakistan Punjab, stand at 525,362 cusecs and 519,362 cusecs, respectively.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Pakistan floods – Link Punjabi

‘Burning with pain’: Pakistan floods threaten major health crisis

Floods wreak havoc across Pakistan, death toll is 1,061