Dirty water takes toll on quake survivors

Aid agencies are launching initiatives to stem the spread of debilitating water-borne diseases in earthquake and flood-ravaged parts of Pakistan.

Heavy monsoon rains have worsened conditions in northern Pakistan, where 75,000 people were killed and 3.5 million left homeless by the 8 October earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale.

In the first 10 days of August alone, more than 800 patients had been treated for acute diarrhoea at Batagram District hospital in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Its children’s ward, which is supported by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), had been overwhelmed. Flooding had contaminated rivers and streams that children drank from, making them seriously ill, officials said.

UNICEF said the main problem was access to clean drinking water, but lack of hygiene awareness was also a major concern. Pakistan’s unsafe water supply, low sanitation coverage and people’s poor hygiene habits meant 60 percent of children suffered diarrhoea.

The UN children's agency planned to launch a hygiene promotion campaign in schools next month to address the problem of water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea. Information would be given on proper hand washing and other good practices to limit the spread of diseases.

The two programmes, “Community Hygiene Education” and “School Hygiene Education”, were planned to run for eight months.

Mohammed Shakaib Jan, UNICEF’s hygiene education officer in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, said there was a lack of hygiene education.

“The hygiene programme [for schools] will target 1,623 schools and around 5,000 teachers will be trained on hygiene awareness,” Jan said.

“It [the programme] will definitely have an impact. People don’t have [the] level of awareness here, especially in rural areas. The programme aims at creating awareness by promoting proper water handling and domestic hygiene – we aim to have a holistic approach,” Jan said.

Rudimentary water storage at a displaced persons camp in quake-affected Pakistani-administered Kashmir

UNICEF had also been shipping in clean drinking water to many areas since the October quake. However, the cost was high and donor funds were unable to sustain the system beyond June.

Since then UNICEF has been in charge of connecting water pipelines to camps in the quake-affected area. Thirty-one camps had been connected but five more, all in the Muzaffarabad district, were still to be hooked up.

“We hope to have connected all the camps by the end of this month,” Mohammed El-Faki, UNICEF’s regional officer for water environmental sanitation in Muzaffarabad, said.

Meanwhile, many families continue to suffer.

“We don’t have enough water and the tank of water is too small. We have 50 tents and families here with only this,” Tahira Rafeqe, a mother-of-four at Jinnah camp in the Neelum Valley, outside Muzaffarabad city, said while pointing at the camp's water tank.

However, at the Al-Harmain camp in Chehla Bandi, also outside Muzaffarabad, six women washing their clothes agreed there was enough water for its 178 families.

Victor Vincent Kinyanju, UNICEF project officer for Water Environment Sanitation (WES), said there was not enough water before the earthquake.

“Muzaffarabad had a population of 60,000 [before the earthquake] and now it is around 120,000 [because of migration of quake-affected people]. But we [UNICEF] have boosted the amount of water from three gallons per day to 4.5 [in Muzaffarabad],” Kinyanju explained.

The water's quality was questionable, but it was easier to control the quality with pipes than by trucking it in, he added.

AJ/JL/GS/DS