India allows UN aid to fight measles in battered isles
India allows UN aid to fight measles in battered isles
Sanjeev Miglani, Reuters/Port Blair
India, which had shunned foreign help for its tsunami victims, has now allowed the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) to help mount a campaign in the battered Andaman and Nicobar islands to prevent an outbreak of measles and blindness among children.
It is the first international aid agency allowed into restricted islands in the chain, closer to Myanmar and Indonesia than the Indian mainland and home to primitive tribes with almost no contact with the outside world, after criticism that relief efforts were being impeded.
Indian doctors from Unicef have visited the islands of Little Andaman, Car Nicobar and Nancowry, where access is tightly controlled, to inoculate thousands of children against measles, and hand out vitamin A tablets.
Other major aid groups, such as Medicins Sans Frontier and Oxfam are still barred from the fragile chain of tropical islands, home to five of the world's most primitive tribes.
New Delhi also has a strong military presence on the strategic islands, which straddle vital shipping lanes.
The Andaman and Nicobar islands, mainly the more southerly Nicobar group, was one of the worst hit areas of India and account for almost half the more than 15,700 deaths.
Officials in the federally administered archipelago said UNICEF was allowed in as a partner of the government, unlike other agencies which wanted to visit the islands to make their own assessment of the damage from the Dec. 26 tsunami.
"Unicef is a partner of the government in the national immunization program. We see no harm if Unicef wants to assist us in measles immunization," islands development commissioner Anshu Prakash told Reuters.
"We certainly welcome feedback from a reputed UN body."
Aid workers are still digging out bodies from the rubble of smashed homes and huts and buried under piles of crushed trees more than two weeks after the disaster.
At least 40,000 people have been forced from their homes.
Health experts said children living in crowded camps who were either malnourished or weakened by other infections were vulnerable to measles, potentially fatal.
"A single case of measles will spread more quickly in a crowded camp situation and the impact may be more severe given the fragile state of the children who have been affected by the tsunami," said doctor S.K. Paul, deputy director of the health services department.
Paul said children in relief camps in the island capital Port Blair and in Car Nicobar have already been inoculated against measles and there was no report of any outbreak.
India's military is leading all relief and rescue work in the islands after the administration was accused of moving to slowly.
Aid experts say New Delhi's decision to reject international teams, many of them trained to deal with such disasters, had worsened the situation in a region where remoteness made relief far more difficult.
"In general, it only helps to use every possible assistance, as long as you can coordinate it," said one worker from an international aid group camping in Port Blair.
"The one comforting factor here is the military, they are doing a splendid job."