Fresh Floods Kill 80 More People in South Asia
Date: 22-Aug-07
Country: INDIA
Many victims drowned, died from diseases spread by dirty water or were killed by snakebites after the fresh rains in a region already exhausted by more than a month of flood chaos.
More than 1,700 Indians, Nepalis and Bangladeshis have been killed in the last few weeks of monsoon flooding. Hundreds of thousands of people across the region remain marooned or homeless.
Another 3,800 Bangladeshis have been reported with diarrhoea since Monday, bringing the total to 69,000 so far this month, health officials said. A quarter of a million Indians have caught some kind of disease from the stagnant flood waters.
Furious because they were not getting enough supplies, marooned flood victims attacked disaster relief officials in Samastipur district in India's Bihar state, which is enduring some of the worst floods in living memory.
"We have lost all hopes of survival as whatever food we had is gone," said Ramsaki Devi, who lives in Samastipur.
Food prices have shot up in the region. Relief supply vans are struggling against a waterlogged road network.
In Kolkata, where the two cyclists were electrocuted, health workers were trying to drain flooded potholes and fog areas with insecticide to prevent disease-carrying mosquitoes from breeding.
The Padma, a major river in Bangladesh, is likely to swell again in the next few days and inundate fresh areas, according to Dhaka's Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre. Most other rivers are receding, it said.