Bangladesh receives aid in disaster zone

Overburdened relief centres in Bangladesh on Wednesday scrambled to help tens of thousands of cyclone survivors as worried aid groups tracked an outbreak of waterborne illness that reportedly left two children dead.

Fistfights broke out in some relief camps, as ever-growing crowds of people struggled to get help after last week's cyclone, which killed at least 31-hundred people and left many times that number homeless.

The chief of the army on Wednesday travelled to the Bagerhat district, one of the worst hit by the disaster, to help with the distribution of relief supplies. Health officials, meanwhile, were bracing for an outbreak of waterborne diseases because Cyclone Sidr destroyed many wells that supplied safe drinking water.

Dhaka's Daily Star newspaper, quoting local health officials, reported two children had died of diarrhoea in the hard-hit district of Patuakhali.

Health workers were distributing water purification tablets among survivors along with safe drinking water, they said. Food, fresh water and temporary shelter had still not reached many of the exhausted survivors six days after the cyclone slammed into the low lying
country.

In a televised speech on Tuesday, the country's interim leader described the cyclone as "a national calamity" and urged citizens to help the affected people.

Aid agencies and UN officials were visiting the affected areas to assess the damage and the aid needed, according to a spokesman for the United Nations Development Programme in Bangladesh.

The government said international aid worth about 120 (m) million US dollars had so far been promised. But relief items such as tents, rice and water have been slow to reach most survivors of the worst cyclone to hit Bangladesh in a decade.

The storm, which tore along Bangladesh's southwestern coast on Thursday, left tens of thousands of people homeless and desperate for help. The official death toll stood at three thousand and 153, but local media reports said more than four thousand people may have been killed.

The Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross, suggested the final figure could be around 10-thousand.