First Signs of Disease Emerge As Victims of Tsunami Await Aid

Apr 05, 08:29 PM

Current Headlines: By Meraiah Foley

Diarrhea has broken out among children huddled in camps of tsunami survivors in the Solomon Islands, a Red Cross official said Wednesday -- the first worrying sign that thousands of people who lost their homes may be at risk of disease.

International aid was slow to trickle in to survivors, particularly in the hardest-hit town of Gizo in the western Solomons. At least 2,000 people spent a third unsheltered night on a hillside near Gizo after a magnitude-8.1 undersea quake sent waves up to 16 feet high smashed into the western Solomons on Monday.

Aid workers complained today that relief efforts are chaotic and lack resources as the homeless in squalid camp faced growing health risks.

"We are under-resourced, we need bigger vehicles," said disaster official Jonathan Taisia at the main Red Cross center in Gizo, as a chartered helicopter landed with the latest load of tarps and food.

The United Nations raised the death toll by six today to 34 and authorities estimate the number of homeless at around 5,600 in the impoverished chain of some 200 islands northeast of Australia in the South Pacific.

Six doctors and 15 nurses reached Gizo on Wednesday. An Australian air force transport plane left Sydney before dawn today loaded with humanitarian relief supplies bound for the Solomons.

Much of the aid coming into Gizo wasn't being distributed beyond depots because of vehicle shortages, and a lack of workers to load trucks or clear debris that has severed road links to outlying villages.

Drinking water, food and medicine are in extremely short supply on Ghizo, the island on which Gizo town sits. Most aid was being delivered to Munda, on a nearby island, and a shortage of boats hampered efforts. Most of the local fleet of canoes and other vessels was destroyed by the tsunami.

Frustrations were starting to show among survivors, many of whom fled the tsunami with whatever supplies they could carry.

"There's no water [with which] to wash, no water to drink," said Esther Zekele, who fled with her husband and five children. The single sack of rice they brought to higher ground was half-empty, and no aid officials had come to their makeshift camp.

"We are just waiting, wondering why they haven't come," she said.

Red Cross official Nancy Jolo said the risk of disease was rising in the largest refugee camp located near Gizo.

"What we are experiencing right now in some of the campsites is children starting to experience diarrhea," Jolo told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Fakarii said medical staff in Gizo had been overwhelmed by injuries and feared diseases such as diarrhea, cholera and malaria could break out because of the unhygienic conditions and lack of clean water and fresh food.

"The conditions at Gizo are such that these are likely things to happen unless action is taken quickly," Fakarii told The Associated Press.

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