Water released from the lake flowed into neighboring Jaffarabad and Bubak districts, aimed at sparing more populated cities and towns across Sindh, including Sehwan, Dadu and Bhan Syedabad, from the worst of the floods, according to Mangan. Pakistan’s record monsoon rains and melting glaciers in the country’s northern mountains have affected 33 million people — or 15 percent of its population — according to government officials and aid groups. A third of Pakistan was under water after experiencing the heaviest rainfall on record, according to satellite images from the European Space Agency (ESA). Some areas — particularly the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan — have seen monsoon rain levels five times their normal. The death toll since mid-June rose to 1,305 as of Sunday — with nearly a third of the victims children — according to the country’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). Three million children are now in urgent need of humanitarian assistance across Pakistan due to increased risk of waterborne diseases, drowning and malnutrition, UNICEF warned in a statement on Wednesday. Several international aid agencies began arriving in flood-ravaged Pakistan on Monday, delivering food, clean water and medicine to victims of what the United Nations has called a “monsoon on steroids.”
“This won’t be over in two months”
Dr. Deedar Hussain of Pakistan’s health department said he feared an outbreak of waterborne diseases if the flood waters did not recede quickly enough. “Many patients have come to us. According to our register, we have received 16,000 patients (from the area). Mostly patients are suffering from water (flood) allergy and there are patients suffering from diarrhea and fever. Also there are patients who they are suffering from malaria as we are testing them for malaria parasite,” Hussain told Reuters on Saturday. Aurélie Godet, a press officer for Doctors of the World, told CNN on Thursday that the flood waters had washed away everything. “Survivors have to start from scratch. They urgently need decent shelter, affordable food, access to health and basic products. But this will not end in two months, they need long-term help,” Gaudet said. Godet said children come to their clinics with severe foot injuries because they don’t have shoes. And he said some people can’t afford their regular medicines because of price increases that are also making food very expensive, even outside the flood zone. “In the dryer areas, survivors tell us that one difference now for them is food prices because the roads are inaccessible. It’s four times market prices. They can’t afford to eat,” he said. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on August 30 that the floods were “the worst in the country’s history” and estimated that the disaster had caused more than $10 billion in damage to infrastructure, homes and farms. According to the charity Action Against Hunger, 27 million people in the country did not have access to enough food before the floods, and now the risk of widespread hunger is even more immediate.
