A child’s death highlights threat posed to young by Pakistan’s floods

SEHWAN, Pakistan: In the hours before her six-year-old son died in her lap, Badar Bibi recalled how she rushed from a field clinic set up to treat people caught in Pakistan’s worst floods in decades to a city hospital, desperate to bring down the boy’s fever.

First she took Abdul Qadeer to a makeshift medical centre set up by the air force, where doctors managed to bring down his temperature from 106 Fahrenheit. They also helped her get a tuk-tuk to rush him to the hospital in the nearby city of Sehwan.

There the boy was put on a drip, and when his condition continued to improve, he was discharged. But the night that Bibi took her son back to a government-run tent camp for displaced families, he died.

“Doctors told me ... he was alright,” said the 29-year-old.

“I took my child in my arms ... and at night my child died,” she said, sobbing.

Shahid Iqbal, the doctor who treated the boy at the field clinic, said it had not been possible to diagnose the exact cause of his fever.

But he is one of hundreds of children who have died in the deluge that has devastated large parts of Pakistan’s southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan, either drowned as waters flooded homes or struck by diseases, some of them water-borne.

Access to emergency medical support has been seriously hampered by blocked roads, damaged buildings and collapsed bridges.

Record monsoon rains and melting glaciers triggered the disaster that has shown no sign of abating for the last month.

The United Nations and Pakistan have linked the extreme weather to climate change; some 600,000 people have fled their homes.

Bibi’s family managed to escape to safety in mid-August after raging floods swamped her village in Mehar, Sindh. It is now submerged, and residents say even two-storey houses are barely visible above the water.

Health departments data from the other three provinces of Pakistan also show thousands of patients from flood-hit areas have gone to hospitals and clinics each day.

“Large number of children are coming from camps,” Moinuddin Siddiqui, director of the Abdullah Shah Institute in Sehwan told Reuters.

“My grandson was suffering from fever and diarrhoea,” Moeenullah Khan told Reuters at a camp in Charsadda, in the northwest of the country. He said a doctor advised him to take the boy to another hospital in a nearby city.

“I don’t have any money,” said Khan.

Aadarsh Laghari, a communications officer with UNICEF, said there were no reliable data yet on how many children in flood-affected areas were falling sick.

“There are children who are on the roadside, families on the roadside. And the worst thing about this is that they are now being forced to consume the very stagnant floodwater that is full of diseases,” he told Reuters.