Pakistan's government has compared the impact of the country's devastating floods to the country's partition from India as it revealed more than 20 million people had been made homeless by the disaster.
The prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said the country faced challenges similar to those during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent into Hindu-dominated India and Muslim-majority Pakistan in which about 500,000 people were killed in mass violence and thousands of families were torn apart as 10 million refugees crossed the new border.
Gilani said 20 million people were now homeless and called on Pakistanis to rise to the occasion, amid growing fears of social unrest or even a military takeover following the government's shambolic response to the floods.
"The nation faced the situation successfully at that time [of the partition] and inshallah [God willing] we will emerge successful in this test," he said.
About 1,600 people have died in the floods and aid agencies expect the toll to rise due to outbreaks of deadly waterborne diseases. A case of cholera was confirmed today in Mingora, the main town in Swat Valley in the north-east of the country, and UN aid workers are taking proactive measures to try to avert a crisis.
A UN humanitarian operations spokesman, Maurizio Giuliano, said at least 36,000 people believed to have potentially fatal acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) were being treated for cholera.
"Given that there is a significant risk of cholera, which is a deadly and dangerous and a potentially epidemic disease, instead of focusing on testing, everyone who has AWD is being treated for cholera," he told Reuters.
Aid agencies have warned that 6 million children are at risk of life-threatening diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition and pneumonia. Stagnant flood plains in densely populated, poverty-stricken urban areas may become breeding grounds for cholera, mosquitos and malaria. The Guardian
