Up to Half of the Victims of the Tsunami are Children, says UN by The Independent / UNICEF .. 4:09pm 30th Dec, 2004   29 December 2004    "Up to half the victims of the tsunami are children, says UN", by Justin Huggler & Andrew Buncombe. (The Independent)    Up to half the victims of the tsunami are children, says UN. Tens of thousands more are orphaned, and face threat of disease.    On any other day, the children would have been at school or the poorer ones at work. But on a balmy Sunday morning, the beach in Madras was alive with children doing what they did every week - playing cricket. Then the water came.    Everyone here has a story. All can tell how the tsunami swallowed their children, sweeping them out to sea. Maran saw his niece Velankani dragged away from him. He said: "I was trying to grab hold of her, but the sea pulled her out of my arms.We were all trying to grab hold of the children but no one could do anything."    For Magesh, it was his sister Elizabeth and her seven-year-old daughter Martina. He said: "I could see them. Then suddenly the water came and they were gone."    The cruelty was in the timing. Kapaliswaram, a policeman, described the scene: "There were kids playing cricket right out at the edge of the sea. Nobody round here knows who they were. No trace of their bodies has been found." Fishermen told how they had been swept away but had been able to swim back. The children could not. Nor could they run fast enough to escape.    The walls of water sent crashing onto the coasts of south Asia by the biggest earthquake in 40 years took a disproportionate number of young lives. It may have been as many as half of the victims - the toll stood at 60,000 last night. As the calmer waters return a steady flow of bodies, communities are coming to terms with a lost generation.    Mike Kiernan, a spokesman for Save the Children in Washington, said: "The death toll among children in these disasters is always high, especially in the poorest parts of the world - that is one of the tragedies. In villages such as Cuddalore in India we know that more than half of the 400 victims were children. There will also likely be many thousands of children orphaned." Waterborne diseases such as typhoid and cholera, as well as malaria, would take their toll on the youngest and weakest survivors, he warned.    A spokesman for the United Nations children's fund Unicef said that up to half of those killed could have been children. Communities were suffering a double loss: dead children, and orphaned boys and girls. He said: "Our major concern is that the kids who survived, now survive the aftermath. Children are the most vulnerable to disease and lack of proper nutrition and water."    Petra Nemcova, a Czech model, described the impact in the Thai resort of Khao Lak. "This huge wave pulled us out of the house. People were screaming and kids were screaming 'Help! Help!' After a few minutes you didn't hear the kids any more." Ms Nemcova's boyfriend, the photographer Simon Atlee, is one of many missing Britons.    In the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, the playing fields were strewn with more than 1,000 corpses, hundreds of them children. They died where they had played. Mahmud Azaf, who lost all three of his own children, said: "I was on the field as a referee. The waves suddenly came in and I was saved by God - I got caught in the branches of a tree."    Unicef says the next few days will be critical. "We're concerned about providing safe water, which is urgent in all these countries, and about preventing the spread of disease," a spokesman said.    Another threat to survivors in Sri Lanka is landmines dislodged by floodwaters. A spokesman for Unicef said: "Mines have been washed out of known minefields and warning signs on mined areas have been swept away or destroyed. The greatest danger to civilians will come when they return to their homes, not knowing where the mines are."    Laura Conrad, a spokeswoman for Save the Children in London, said that aid groups had long-established projects in Sri Lanka to try to help reunite children and their families who had been separated by the long-simmering civil war.    Along with their counterparts in other countries, they will face a massive task. Down the coast from Madras, in Cuddalore, people were digging two mass graves. According to Hindu tradition, adults are cremated, but the bodies of children are buried. In Cuddalore there was more demand for burials than cremations.    The smell of disinfectant hangs over the beach at Sri Niwasa Puram in Madras. Twenty bodies were washed ashore here, and the authorities were trying to clean up. But many other bodies have disappeared. Maran found the body of his niece, but has been unable to find his grandmother and sister, who he also saw washed out to sea. This is India's fourth largest city, a teeming metropolis that epitomises much of the spirit of the new, economically thriving India. But where Madras meets the sea yesterday, that city disappeared, and there were only crowds who gathered at the devastated beaches.    Heading south down the coast from Madras, it gets worse. In Cuddalore, 13 villages were destroyed. In the small district of Nagapattinam alone, 2,500 people are believed dead. As the survivors spoke yesterday, you could still feel aftershocks from the great earthquake. Everybody here felt the earthquake, but nobody knew it was a terrible sign of danger. In Sri Lanka, there were even reports that many children went to the beach in excitement to see the huge waves.    All along the sea front in Madras, the people sat in little huddled groups staring out to sea. The beach is littered with broken pieces of fishing boats. Stray dogs huddle into the mounds of old clothes donated for survivors. But the people do not see any of that. They are still replaying the events they saw that day, when the sea took their children from them.    28 December 2004 (UNICEF)    Children are likely to account for more than a third of those killed when massive waves smashed into coastal communities across Asia, UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said today.    “Virtually no country has a population with less than a third of its population aged eighteen years or below and in some of the countries up to 50 per cent of the population is young, she told reporters at the United Nations.    According to UNICEF, children account for a large proportion of casualties because they represent 39 per cent of the overall population in the eight hardest-hit countries. Eyewitness accounts indicate that many children died because they weren't strong enough to hold on to fixtures or trees when huge tidal waves swept them off their feet. Kids can run but they were least able to withstand the flooding or hold on. So that is one of the reasons children have been particularly affected, Carol Bellamy said.    Latest estimates suggest the huge undersea earthquake off the coast of Indonesia and the tsunami it triggered on Sunday killed more than 50,000 people and left millions homeless in countries around the Indian Ocean.    Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand were among the worst hit by the undersea earthquake which measured 9.0 on the Richter scale and triggered huge waves from Malaysia to Africa.    As millions of people in coastal communities around the rim of the Indian Ocean struggle to survive the aftermath of the disaster, the United Nations is coordinating one of the world's largest ever relief operations.    A UNICEF-chartered plane packed with medical supplies, shelter materials and education kits left Denmark this evening.    These first supplies, destined for Sri Lanka, include enough emergency health supplies for 150,000 people for three months, 150,000 sachets of oral rehydration salts to combat diarrhoea and 20 tents. School-in-a-box kits (containing education materials for 8,000 pupils and their teachers) and recreation kits are also included in the shipment, ensuring that children can resume their education as quickly as possible and regain a sense of normality.    We are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to start packing and shipping essential supplies for an emergency in the initial critical hours. Ten additional staff worked late into the evening yesterday, packing the items ready for despatch today, said Soren Hansen, UNICEF's head of warehouse and logistics operations in Copenhagen. A second flight bound for Sri Lanka, sponsored by the Belgian Government and containing 20 tonnes of tarpaulins and tents, was scheduled to leave Dubai tonight.    The earthquake and tsunamis could not have been predicted, but thanks to UNICEF's network of emergency warehouse hubs around the world, including Dubai, we are prepared for just such a crisis, Soren Hansen added.    More emergency health kits are expected to leave Copenhagen tomorrow (Wednesday), on their way to Indonesia.    UNICEF's commitment is to be able to respond to an emergency within 48 hours. UNICEF has long-established offices in every affected country staffed by experts who live and work there throughout the year.    In Thailand, UNICEF is assessing both immediate and long-term needs in the affected areas, which in addition to the tourist spots Phuket and Krabi also include fishing communities along other areas of the coast which were completely destroyed by the tidal surge.    UNICEF is focusing on providing water, sanitation facilities and food for those in the affected areas, especially children, as well as addressing the longer-term needs for education, psychological support and replacing lost livelihood of entire communities.    In Sri Lanka, UNICEF has already responded to a government request for shelter supplies, providing more than 30,000 blankets and sleeping mats as well as T-shirts and other articles of clothing from local emergency stocks.    In India, UNICEF has delivered an initial 50 water tanks to the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where the government has set up 200 relief sites in seven affected districts. UNICEF expects to provide the region with hundreds of thousands of water purification tablets, a total of 1,600 community water tanks, 200,000 sachets of oral rehydration salts, medical supplies sufficient to serve 30 health centres, and 30,000 blankets.    Serious concerns remain for children in the Indian islands of Andaman and Nicobar where death tolls of up to 7,000 have been reported.    In Indonesia, UNICEF staff are part of a larger UN assessment team that has headed into worst-hit Aceh province to identify urgent needs. Some 500,000 people in the province have been directly affected, particularly in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, where houses have been destroyed and water, power and telecommunications disrupted. All but two of Banda Aceh's ambulances were destroyed.    In Somalia, where hundreds of families have been left without shelter, food and clean drinking water, a UNICEF team assessing the affected areas with local authorities is delivering immediate assistance of oral rehydration salts, chlorine powder and essential drugs while arranging for increased supplies as needed. In addition to providing clean water and sanitation facilities, UNICEF will focus on emergency health care, nutritional needs, family relief kits and temporary shelters for the affected families.    In the Maldives, which were hard hit by the tsunamis, UNICEF and UN sister agencies are working with the government to coordinate an international relief effort that will include the immediate provision of water purification supplies, food, clothing for children, shelter supplies, and other basics.    In Bangladesh, and Myanmar UNICEF is supporting government-led efforts to meet localized needs. The impact of the disaster was not as widespread in these countries, although a more complete picture is still emerging.    UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland said the UN would probably make its largest ever appeal for humanitarian funding. To support UNICEF's efforts to help children and their families who were affected by the disaster please click on the link below.    December 30, 2004    "Children most at risk from disease", by Adam Cresswell. (The Australian)    Too young to swim and too small to run, children were killed in thousands by the tsunamis. Now they are expected to be the biggest victims of the disaster's next wave - disease.    The UN children's agency UNICEF estimates children and babies will account for more than a third of the victims of the initial disaster, with thousands of youngsters dying from infection and disease set to double the death toll.    Pediatricians warn children will be particularly vulnerable as disease begins to spread from poisoned water and rotting corpses. John Pearn, professor of paediatrics and child health at the Royal Children's Hospital in Brisbane, Australia confirmed warnings that the death toll from disease could potentially be as high as that from the tsunami. A former surgeon-general with the Australian Defence Force who helped in the rescue missions to Papua New Guinea after the tsunami of July 1998, Professor Pearn said children could easily become separated from their families in crisis situations.    Once that happened, they were at risk because they lacked the ability to take immediate survival steps such as sterilising wounds and finding clean water. "In any natural disaster, in that period before the formal rescue services come in -- the period we call the window of survivability -- children depend on their families," he said. "In a terrible thing like this situation, the families are not there -- they have been drowned or lost or dispersed."    Peter Ngo, staff specialist at the Children's Hospital at Westmead, western Sydney, said size was a critical factor that put children in peril. "They are easily washed away and they probably have less swimming skills," he said.    In the PNG disaster, 8000 people drowned within 15 minutes, and Professor Pearn said a week later he and his team were still finding children whose wounds had not been cleaned up. "After that, children are vulnerable to the diseases which will surely follow, particularly the gastroenterological diseases such as dysentery and cholera," he said.    "They kill by producing dehydration, and children are very susceptible compared with adults because they lose more fluids due to their high surface area to body volume ratios. "And they haven't built up the immunity to disease that many adults have."    David Nabarro, an official with the World Health Organisation, warned there was a chance as many people could die from communicable diseases as from the tsunami. Ian Hickie, executive director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at Sydney University, said children were more likely to feel the psychological effects of the tragedy as their social networks were often destroyed. "Children who are exposed to these terrible events tend to remain fearful for a long time and may have difficulty coping with everyday events," he said.
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