By SPA,
Yangon : Aid was trickling in on Sunday to an estimated 2.5 million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta as more foreign envoys tried to get the junta to admit large-scale international relief, Reuters reported.
Thousands of children could die within weeks if food does not get to them soon, non-government aid organization Save the Children said.
The World Food Programme (WFP), leading the outside emergency food effort, said it had managed to get rice and beans to 212,000 of the 750,000 people it thinks are most in need after the May 2 storm, which left at least 134, 00 dead or missing.
“It’s not enough. There are a very large number of people who are yet to receive any kind of assistance and that’s what’s keeping our teams working round the clock,” WFP spokesman
Marcus Prior said in Bangkok.
Save the Children said in a Sunday statement its reseach had found some “30,000 children under the age of five in the cyclone-affected Irrawaddy Delta were already acutely malnourished before the cyclone hit” on May 2.
“Of those, Save the Children believes that several thousand are at risk of death in the next two to three weeks because of a lack of food.”
In the last 50 years, only two Asian cyclones have exceeded Nargis in terms of human cost — a 1970 storm that killed 500,000 people in neighbouring Bangladesh, and another that killed 143,000 in 1991, also in Bangladesh.