Pakistan quake relief resumes

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan - Vital helicopter flights carrying food, blankets and tents to thousands of survivors of the earthquake in northern Pakistan resumed after lashing rains stopped.

However, many are likely to die before help can reach them in the remnants of remote mountain villages cut off by landslides with winter approaching rapidly.

"We saw rows of people in a really bad way with suppurating wounds. They need urgent treatment," Sean Keogh, a doctor with the British medical aid group Merlin, said after a three-day trek up the badly hit Neelum valley of Pakistani Kashmir.

"There are 1,000 to 2,000 significantly wounded that need surgical treatment," he said. "Wounds are pouring puss, patients are going to get septic and die."

With the valley's road swept away by landslides, nobody knows how many people need help in its upper reaches north of Muzaffarabad, the region's capital and centre of the relief effort, Keogh said.

"There are going to be a lot more deaths," he said a day after storms virtually closed down the airlift trying to reach survivors.

So far, the quake is known to have killed 41,000 people in Pakistan and injured 67,000, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said.

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Rodrigo de Rato said the toll was likely to rise once more inaccessible places are reached.

The weather cleared on Monday, nine days after the quake struck in the mountains of Kashmir and North West Frontier Province (NWFP), allowing helicopters, the only means of getting aid to many of the traumatised survivors quickly, to take off.

"Picking up the casualties, that's the hardest part, having to turn people away," US Army helicopter pilot Carlos Legoas, 34, said between flights.

"There was a man carrying a little baby. He came up to the aircraft and our interpreter had to tell him we could be back to fetch him later," the Peru-born pilot said. "His kid looked like a rag doll."

- REUTERS