Disease risk to homeless families after Bangladesh cyclone

Hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi families are still struggling without proper homes and at higher risk of disease, a month after cyclone Aila ravaged parts of the country.Cyclone Aila tore through parts of coastal Bangladesh and eastern India this time last month, killing more than 200 people and leaving millions homeless. Just in Bangladesh 190 people were killed and 750,000 left homeless.

One month on from the cyclone, 350,000 victims are still living in temporary shelter on embankments, roadsides, school buildings and cyclone shelters, said aid workers there.
Many of these families still don’t have water, sanitation or jobs anymore, and so disease is becoming a serious problem. More than 1,000 people a day are already being treated for diarrhoea. "People urgently need shelter, safe water and sanitation facilities and restoration of livelihoods," said Heather Blackwell, working for aid agency, Oxfam. "Government, humanitarian organisations, UN and donors should come together to assist large numbers of displaced people who still need immediate support," she added.

Millions of people were left marooned by floodwater or forced into shelters when the powerful cyclone Alia struck on May 25 triggering tidal surges and flooding that killed at least 275 people. Now officials and aid workers fear that figure could rise as a result of epidemics from contaminated floodwaters in the cyclone's aftermath. The authorities moved some half a million people to temporary shelters after they fled their homes when their houses collapsed or were crushed by uprooted trees. Cyclone Alia also destroyed large areas of crops in both Bangladesh and India. Storm surges washed away dozens of shrimp farms and inundated rice fields in Bangladesh, which is battered by storms every year. Many of the areas hit were still recovering from Cyclone Sidr in November 2007, which killed 3,500 people in Bangladesh and left at least a million homeless.

In recent years, disaster-prone Bangladesh, one of the world's most highly populated and poorest countries, has seen climate-related problems become bore and more frequent and more and more intense. A cyclone in 1991 killed about 140,000 people and another in late 2007 killed more than 3,300 people. The United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted Bangladesh could lose nearly one-fifth of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels because of global warming.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children