Cholera hits flood-stricken towns

Cholera has broken out in two areas of Burma's Irrawaddy Delta, where hundreds of thousands of cyclone victims are living rough, with no fresh water, or food writes Edward Loxton for The First Post.

Doctors in the region's two major towns, Bogalay and Laputta, told a local correspondent of the exile magazine Irrawaddy that an unknown number of people had already died of the disease in Bogalay.

"The (feared) cholera outbreak has begun," one doctor was quoted as saying. Fresh water was unavailable in the area, "so they drink water from the creeks and rivers."

The flood-swollen waterways that crisscross the Irrawaddy delta are crammed with dead bodies and animal carcasses. An anonymous army major said 70,000 people were known to have died in Bogalay and Laputta alone.

More than 600 villages in the delta region had disappeared beneath the tidal wave unleashed by Saturday's cyclone, the officer said.

Another army relief worker told Irrawaddy: "There's not the trace of a village left after the water has receded. They are just open, empty places now. There are thousands of decaying corpses around islands, villages and along the waterfronts. There is no one to cremate the bodies."

The presence of Burmese army soldiers among the relief workers indicates that the regime is at last moving to organise long-overdue aid, six days after the cyclone struck the region. Burma observers say that by enlisting troops in the relief effort, however, the regime is taking a calculated risk, confronting soldiers and family men with the stark evidence of the indifference shown by the top brass to the plight of the cyclone victims.

FIRST POSTED MAY 8, 2008