ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN (ANS) -- The world is only now waking up to the alarm that the humanitarian community has been sounding for more than three weeks about the scale of the emergency here in Pakistan. It’s difficult and rather pointless for those of us in-country to spend too much time wondering why the response, especially in terms of funding, has been so slow to kick in. There is just too much work to do on the ground here, and we have no time for hand-wringing.

A man evacuates his children through waist-deep waters after heavy flooding in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province (Photo: Reuters/Adrees Latif)

One reason cited for the lack of funding is that the death toll still only stands at a relatively modest 1,400 or so, but those of us on the ground know that this number could drastically increase, with the specters of both disease and food shortages hanging over the country. If we take the right sort of action now, we do have the chance to change this gloomy picture.

I can only offer my perspective as a first-hand witness. The deficient and delayed response is starting to exact its cost on the Pakistani people, especially the most vulnerable. In aid world jargon we speak of it as the “second-wave” of death, which sounds too abstract to register with most audiences. But its meaning is very plain. The lives of hundreds of thousands are at immediate risk. We have anecdotal evidence that children are already dying. If we don’t act quickly, many, many more will die.

Even with flood waters receding, literally millions of families have yet to be reached with vital aid, especially food, water and medical support. Isolated communities’ weakest members, the children, the elderly and pregnant mothers, are suffering from dehydration and other complications brought on by highly preventable diseases such as diarrhea which is the result of the mounting lack of safe drinking water. Dirty, polluted water kills. Try to imagine waking-up in the morning and there being no water for you and your family to drink. Yes, there is water everywhere around you, but due to pollution you could be handing your child the equivalent of poison – that is the daily dilemma for so many mothers in Pakistan right now.

If the response does not escalate quickly, an already horrible situation will get much worse. The World Health Organization predicts that up to 1.5 million cases of diarrheal diseases—including as many as 140,000 cases of cholera—150 cases of measles, 350,000 cases of acute respiratory infections, and up to 100,000 cases of malaria could occur over the next three months. These conditions can be treated easily but they will go unattended and cause this “second wave of death,” if the international community does not provide more funding, and fast.

What’s more, the current $460M sought by the UN is just what is needed for the initial relief period and was based on lower estimates of the actual number of people needing assistance—and only slightly more than 50 percent of that amount has even been funded. In the medium-term, when these initial funds have long been spent, a food security crisis is highly likely to develop due to lack of land rehabilitation, basic seeds and tools to get people back to some level of self-sufficiency.

In Punjab, which is (or was!) the breadbasket of Pakistan, prime arable land has been scourged. If a massive effort could be made to rehabilitate those sections of land from which floodwater recedes quickly, then at least some crops could be planted by October, which may mitigate this crisis. It must be done, and for that we need more funding to start that work in a timely manner.

Governments around the world can and must do more. In this era of billions of dollars going to stimulus packages and bank bail-outs, surely the people of Pakistan—caught in a tragedy the scope of which “the world has never seen,” as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said when he visited the country—deserve a better deal.

Note: Concern has worked in Pakistan since 2001, responding to the needs of Afghan refugees fleeing the US and allied troops’ ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

For more information, go to: www.concernusa.org

Dorothy Blane comes originally from Scotland, and has worked for various organizations, including the United Nations, for nearly 20 years. Since joining Concern in 1998, Dorothy has worked in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia and North Korea. She has served as Country Director in Pakistan for more than four years, managing both development and emergency programs, including Concern’s response to the massive earthquake that struck in 2005.