Pakistan Red Crescent Society: 70,000 more survivors targeted

Doctors and volunteers worked through Eid.

ISLAMABAD: The flooding in Nawabshah, Dadu and Khairpur districts has prompted the Pakistan Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to come forward to announce support for an additional 70,000 people.

“The PRCS has been supporting 70,000 flood victims in Mirpurkhas, Badin and Thatta since the floods started and it has been decided that we will cater to an additional 70,000 [people],” said the society’s chairperson Nilofar Bakhtiar while chairing a meeting. The focus will be on shelter, food and non-food items, healthcare and water and sanitation.

According to the PRCS’s Muhammad Ilyas Khan, staff and volunteers worked through Eid, especially in Kharyo, Ghawar and Dabi union councils and other areas of Badin district, where the society was supporting 10,000 families (70,000 individuals).

The society is also distributing relief items and providing clean drinking water to the people of Thatta, Mithi, Tharparkar and Mirpurkhas. Medical teams are providing special nutrition packages and have arranged a psychosocial support programme for women to minimise the impact of the disaster on them. PRCS operations director Muhammad Ateeb Siddique said that the doctors and lady health workers were also tending to pregnant women.

Mobile health units of doctors and paramedics are already at work in Badin and Mirpurkhas. These units possess medicines and an ambulance service that are working round the clock.

The PRCS national headquarters will be working with reports from its Sindh branch to help people who have lost their crops and livestock.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 5^th,  2011.