PM says Pakistan bracing for disease after floods

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan's medical system has been badly hit by weeks of flooding, with hundreds of health facilities damaged and tens of thousands of medical workers displaced, the prime minister said Tuesday as the country braced for the spread of disease.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's announcement came as Pakistan's chief meteorologist warned that it would be two weeks until the Indus River — the focus of the flooding still sweeping through the country — returns to normal levels.

Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry said high tides in the Arabian Sea would slow the drainage of the Indus into it. Those tides, he said, will begin changing on Aug. 25.

"The flood situation is not yet over," Chaudhry said, adding that the river would reach peak flood stage late this week.

The floods, which began nearly a month ago with hammering monsoon rains in the northwest, have affected more than 17 million people, the U.N. estimates. Millions of those people have been left homeless as the floods have swept southwards, submerging millions of acres of farmland.

Most of the 1,500 deaths occurred early in the flooding, but the crisis still is growing.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that about 700,000 Pakistanis have been forced into makeshift settlements just in the southern province of Sindh.

While there have been no major disease outbreaks because of the floods, aid agencies are increasingly worried, saying contaminated water and a lack of proper sanitation were already causing a spike in medical problems in camps for the displaced.

"Pakistan and its people are experiencing the worst natural calamity of its history," Gilani said at a meeting on health issues in the flood zone. "As human misery continues to mount, we are seriously concerned with spread of epidemic diseases."

More than 3.5 million children are at risk from waterborne diseases, he said, and skin diseases, respiratory infections and malnutrition are spreading in flooded areas.

The problem is compounded by the flood's impact on the country's medical system — which has long been badly overstretched and underfunded. Gilani said the floods had damaged more than 200 health facilities, and that about one-third of the country's 100,000 women health workers have been displaced. Those health workers are the main primary medical care to millions of rural Pakistani women.