Many areas face shortage of clean drinking water
Ensuring a supply of clean water is emerging as a major challenge in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake. In some places, even the relief workers and soldiers are short of water.
Doctors warned that clean drinking water would be crucial to the control and prevention of epidemics and only bottled water should be used for drinking.
Yue Lin, who was in charge of sanitation teams after the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, urged the central government to secure clean drinking water because most water supplies were likely to have been damaged by the Sichuan quake.
Ms Yue told the China News Service that people were forced to drink rainwater and water from pools and swimming pools after the Tangshan disaster, leading to a sharp rise in cases of intestinal infectious disease.
Arturo Pesigan, World Health Organisation technical officer for emergency and humanitarian action in the Western Pacific, said population displacement, crowding, poor access to safe water, inadequate hygiene and toilet facilities, and unsafe food preparation and handling practices were associated with the transmission of water-borne and food-borne diseases.
He said ensuring uninterrupted supplies of safe drinking water would be the key to preventing infectious diseases.
However, in some parts of the disaster zone, such as Dujiangyan , clean drinking water was already in seriously short supply yesterday.
A relief worker in Dujiangyan - virtually a ghost town, with many of the victims evacuated - told the South China Morning Post that even the relief workers and PLA soldiers there did not have sufficient drinking water.
The few local residents left in Dujiangyan said they had not had any cooked food for days because there was no water for cooking and they had to rely on vegetables and dry food distributed by the government.
At one of the volunteer centres in Chengdu , instant noodles sent as relief supplies piled up because there was no water to cook them.
Dr Pesigan said epidemics did not spontaneously occur after an earthquake and dead bodies were not a cause of infectious disease outbreaks because the victims had not died of infectious diseases. But he warned that epidemics could occur, particularly between 10 days and one month after an earthquake.
Human waste has been found near stores of food at the Jiuzhou stadium in Mianyang , where 20,000 people are camped out, because many cannot wait in the long queues to use the toilets.
Dr Pesigan said: 'Unsafe food and a lack of access to safe water, facilities for personal hygiene and safe sanitation arrangements all create a real risk for outbreaks of infectious disease at any time, but after a disaster these conditions, added to overcrowded temporary shelters, heighten the danger.
'It is how the survivors are managed, rather than how the dead are managed, that determines if and when an epidemic may occur.'
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said it checked 31 water sources on Thursday and found no evidence of contamination.
It said it would set aside 35 million yuan (HK$39 million) to monitor the environmental impact of the earthquake.
