Field hospital struggles to cope with flood victims

(21 Aug 2010) SHOTLIST Government Technical College IDP (Internally Displaced Person) camp 1. Wide exterior of Flood Field Hospital compound, ambulance passing through (AUDIO: siren) 2. Close of sign (Urdu: "Flood Field Hospital, health department Mardan" 3. Wide of interior, doctors treating patients 4. Mid of volunteers giving first aid to a wounded patient 5. Mid of doctor checking a female patient 6. SOUNDBITE (Urdu) Gulzar Hussain, camp doctor: "We are treating patients with diarrhoea everyday and send them back to their tents or home, but we have not identified any case of cholera here yet". 7. Cutaway, doctor writing a prescription 8. SOUNDBITE (Urdu) Gulzar Hussain, camp doctor: "In the camp the necessary things we need are medicine and equipment. If we have updated equipments then we can treat the patients well. An ambulance is also very important as the day before yesterday there was a case of delivery and we didn't have a vehicle here at that time so we used a World Health Organisation vehicle which was here at that time. We sent the patient to Mardan DHQ (District Headquarters) Hospital". 9. Mid of female patient on bed with her new-born twins 10. Close up of twins 11. Mid of patients in bed 12. Wide pan right of ward 13. Low angle of a woman fanning her ill child 14. Wide pan left of tents STORYLINE: Medical staff at a field hospital in Nowshera district, requested more medicine and equipment on Saturday, as they continued to try and treat the sick and injured civilians displaced by the flooding. "In the camp the necessary things we need are medicine and equipment. If we have updated equipments then we can treat the patients well," said Gulzar Hussain, a doctor struggling to run the field hospital at a government technical college in Nowshera, 27 miles east of Peshawar in the country's Northwest. "The day before yesterday," he said, "There was a case for delivery (birth) and we didn't have a vehicle here." However, he said that although they have treated many cases of diarrhoea, so far they had not identified any cases of cholera. The UN High Commission for Refugees said it provides shelter to over 500 families in the Nowshera District and its emergency facility will eventually hold up to 3,000 people affected by the floods. World Health Organisation (WHO) said more than 200 health centres or hospitals across the country had been damaged on destroyed in the floods. Around 150-thousand people are reported to have joined the mass exodus of the Indus River flood plains on Saturday, as floodwaters continued to rise. In the southern Sindh province, 600-thousand people have set-up relief camps as a result of flooding over the past month. The waters have washed away houses, roads and crops and smashed key communication and transport infrastructures. Officials expect the floodwaters will recede nationwide in the next few days as the last river torrents empty into the Arabian Sea. The United Nations Food Programme's Pakistan country director, Wolfgang Herbinger, said on Saturday that the programme needs at least 40 more helicopters to reach the large number of people cut off by the flooding. The floods have affected about one-fifth of Pakistan's territory, straining its civilian government as it also struggles against al-Qaida and Taliban violence. At least 8 (m) million people are in need of water, shelter or other emergency assistance, making the disaster larger than Pakistan's last two humanitarian crises, the exodus from Swat last year amid an army offensive against the Taliban and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...