Americans supply Banda Aceh from the air.....Cholera Confirmed in Sri Lanka

"Spiegel-Online" ^ | January 1, 2005 | "Spiegel-Online"

[longjack]

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 01. Januar 2005, 18:59
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/0,1518,335207,00.html

Hygiene Emergency
 
Doctors Confirm Cholera Outbreak

Many remote areas are still without help on the sixth day after the flood catastrophe. US-Helicoptors reached the region for the frist time today, and they are now distributing food and medicine from the air. Meanwhile, Cholera has broken out in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka.

AP

Aid delivery: Packages are thrown out above the crisis areas

Galle/Banda Aceh - A doctor has diagnosed the gastro-intestinal disease cholera in four families in a reception camp in the city of Galle, Sri Lanka. The spokesperson for the relief organization World Vision, Sönke Weiss , told the news agency, dpa: "We are afraid that cholera will spread in the region like wildfire". In a camp with about 1500 people, there are 300 to 500 orphans. Galle is about 120 kilometers south of the capital Colombo.

The American aircraft carrier "Abraham Lincoln" arrived on the coast of Sumatra. It has twelve helicopters on board which are now carrying aid materials to areas which have been cut off completely from the outside world until now.

In Banda Aceh, the capital of the catastrophe province Aceh,The people ran up to the soldiers and "literally ripped the aid materials of their hands", reports the ARD-"Tageschau". The children, primarily, suffer from water and food shortage.

REUTERS

Debris landscape in Sri Lanka: Doctors fear the spread of Cholera

Heavy rain and several aftershocks have made conditions for the flood victims in Asia worse. A reception camp with 2000 people in Sri Lanka had to be evacuated, in Indonesia the rain increased the danger of epidemics. In the coastal areas of the 13 countries hit by the Tsunami, approximately 5 million people have struggled for a week to get food and clean water. The number of the dead and missing people can soon reach 150,000 according to UN information. At least a third of the victims is children, they say.

The victims were commemorated at the New Year's Eve celebrations worldwide. "We mourn, we cry and our hearts bleed when we see the thousands of victims laying in the streets", the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said in his New Year's address. The authorities in the country expect, meanwhile, that the number of the dead will rise to more than 100,000 in the affected areas. At present, the country confirms more than 80,000 deaths and is by far the hardest hit.

Sri Lanka has reported more than 28,500 dead. On Saturday, India raised its numbers to more than 12,700 victims. Thailand expects that approximately half of the circa 4800 dead in the country are tourists from abroad. In all, 126.893 dead have been officially confirmed.

More than 7000 foreigners are among the innumerable missing persons, most of them from Europe. Considerably more than one thousand people from Germany are missing, according to the German State Department.

"Tragedy beyond the imagination"

AP

Aerial view from a Helicopter over the devastated province Aceh: Help from the air

"The extent of the human tragedy in South Asia transcends the imagination, says Thomas Tighe, head of one of the larger US relief organizations. "The numbers on the victim lists represent individual people, each one was a son or daughter, brother or sister, mother or father or friend". Several governments warned relatives against looking for their relatives and friends in the crisis regions on their own initiative. "You can't recognize the corpses any more", the Thai police warned. The country set up an internet page on which all existing data about the discovered dead and injured is published and made available for an international search.

UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, called upon the world to undertake an extensive effort to care for the affected areas. The USA increased their aid commitments ten-fold to 350 million dollars. Japan promised 500 million dollars. Gas shortages, destroyed roads and bridges further prevented the aid workers in many regions however, to get the the aid materials and basic supplies stacked at airports to the needy. For the refugees at a camp in Banda Aceh on Sumatra, however, the new year began with a glimmer of hope: The rescue workers succeeded in supplying the overfilled Mosques with adequate food and water.

"Spiegel-Online"....Ärzte bestätigen Ausbruch von Cholera

Translated by longjack

 

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[longjack]

Some nice press about our military from Germany.

A reminder....

clicking on a picture or the magnifying glass pulls up a larger view.

longjack

[longjack]

German Ping:

Frohes Neues Jahr und Einen Guten Rutsch

longjack

[backhoe]

Crosslinking:

Master source of links here, updated frequently:

The Great Wave- Sumatra Quake and tsunami of 2004

[G.Mason]

" ... Cholera Outbreak ... "

Say it isn't so!

Gee whiz ... I'm getting soooo confused.

I read HERE ...

That ... "Dead bodies cannot cause disease outbreaks, the Pan American Health Organization said Wednesday"

Will somebody help me out here? ;)

[VOA]

"Dead bodies cannot cause disease outbreaks, the Pan American Health Organization
said Wednesday"

Hmmm...I'm not a doctor, but I'll guess that this is a way of saying that
until LIVE people drink water fouled by decaying corpses...you won't have
an outbreak of disease.

I heard a UCLA professor of infectious diseases this week.
He surely said that water fouled by decaying corpses will likely cause extensive
disease outbreak.

And the prof. mentioned one useful bit of info...
he said that some studies have indicated that simply straining this
sort of fouled water through three or four layers of a sarong (I presume this
is just cotton-fiber cloth) can significantly reduce the infectivity of the
strained water...
(VOA's speculation: the strained water would still stink, but maybe significant
amounts of bacteria are retained in the multiple layers of cloth.)

[G.Mason]

"Hmmm...I'm not a doctor ... "

Hmmm...I'm not a doctor either, but I damn well know dead bodies contaminate.

The important question is, why is this mis-information given out in the first place?

[Royal Wulff]

Dead bodies do not generate fecal matter. It's the contamination of the water supply with sewage which leads to disease outbreak, as I understand it.

[tet68]

CHOLERA! It was inevitable, now things will get much worse.

[txhurl]

Bad news but I expected the disease threat to be much worse by now than it is.

[G.Mason]

"Dead bodies do not generate fecal matter. It's the contamination of the water supply with sewage which leads to disease outbreak, as I understand it."

You don't service wells in Florida, do you?

[Righter-than-Rush]

3,000,000 dead due to this event by the end of the year. Bet me.

[txhurl]

You must be factoring in some war? Or just entropy in general?

[nathanbedford]

Ebenfals

[Caipirabob]

From the CDC:

A person may get cholera by drinking water or eating food contaminated with the cholera bacterium. In an epidemic, the source of the contamination is usually the feces of an infected person. The disease can spread rapidly in areas with inadequate treatment of sewage and drinking water.

The cholera bacterium may also live in the environment in brackish rivers and coastal waters. Shellfish eaten raw have been a source of cholera, and a few persons in the United States have contracted cholera after eating raw or undercooked shellfish from the Gulf of Mexico. The disease is not likely to spread directly from one person to another; therefore, casual contact with an infected person is not a risk for becoming ill.

[OpusatFR]

No sanitation for human waste and contaminated drinking water. They need to get vaccines in there now, which I believe they are doing.

[Freedom Dignity n Honor]

Actually, alot of times when a person or animal dies, it's muscles relax and release both fluid and solid wastes.

[CasearianDaoist]

hi, longjack, Happy New Year to you!

[virgil]

Cholera - The old highly destructive enemy that never quite goes away.

[VOA]

sunday-evening report on the efforts by USS Abraham Lincoln (and US Navy):

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1312662/posts?page=22