Bantul, (Indonesia) May 30 (DPA) Relief teams in the quake-devastated areas of Indonesia's Java island raced to deliver aid and prevent a disease outbreak Tuesday while survivors in remote areas continued to cry for assistance three days after the tremor.
It was the largest tremor to jolt Indonesia, killing more than 5,400 people, since the one that sparked the deadly Asian tsunami in December 2004.
'We got only seven kilograms of rice for about 300 people yesterday,' Sugeng, a resident of Mranggen village in the worst hit district of Bantul, told DPA.
'If there is still no fresh food aid immediately, we will then feed our children with cooking water,' said Sugeng, pointing to the post-quake food crisis.
In several quake-hit rural areas, where still no emergency aid had arrived, survivors were begging for money from passing motorists. In some places, hungry people stopped relief trucks with no security guards, boarded the vehicles and took food supplies destined for other locations.
While the government pledged to set up field hospitals to help treat the wounded, such facilities were still lacking, particularly in the remote areas.
Rescue teams, supported by aid groups and governments from Indonesia and abroad, worked to help survivors amid warnings from health authorities that disease threatened the lives of the tens of thousands injured and more than 100,000 homeless survivors.
'We're planning as we're speaking,' said US embassy humanitarian coordinator Jeral Shelton. 'It happened so quickly that we're just now oriented.'
While much of the aid efforts were focussed on providing food, medicine and temporary shelter to the survivors of Saturday's quake, field officers from the government's disaster task force said evacuating decomposing bodies was also a necessity to prevent disease.
'The sniffer dogs are searching for more bodies under the rubble,' said Bowo, an official with the task force.
The World Health Organisation (WHO), while urging the government to immediately despatch more medicine, additional paramedics and clean water to overcome health problems, was also trying to set up a surveillance system so that it could track any emerging diseases before they became outbreaks.
'With all these people displaced, we have to think about this as a roving community, highly prone to epidemics,' said Dick Thompson, a WHO spokesman. 'We want to prevent small outbreaks from becoming big.'
'Tight surveillance and rapid reaction are critical to keeping an epidemic or disease from breaking out,' he said.
A senior epidemiologist arrived in Yogyakarta Monday night to coordinate prevention efforts as the most serious immediate threats were identified as diarrhoea and measles, Thompson said.
Planes carrying vital supplies were landing at the Yogyakarta airport in the stricken region Tuesday despite a heavily damaged terminal at the facility in the ancient royal capital.
Officials said the death toll from the earthquake had reached 5,427 as of early Tuesday, and thousands of survivors who were injured or whose homes were destroyed were staying on the floors of hospitals and mosques or in makeshift shelters near their damaged houses.
UNICEF said 20,000 people were injured and more than 130,000 left homeless, many of them children.
The magnitude-6.2 quake collapsed thousands of homes in Yogyakarta and neighbouring districts.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who moved his office temporarily to Yogyakarta, visited Klaten district in nearby Central Java province and other badly hit areas.
Many residents in Klaten have complained of getting only small portions of emergency aid since Saturday's quake destroyed their homes and killed more than 1,600 people in the district.
The government has set aside relief funds of 100 billion rupiah ($10.86 million) from now until August while a year of reconstruction and rehabilitation is to begin afterward, costing the government an estimated 1.1 trillion rupiah ($131.67 million).
Vice President Jusuf Kalla said survivors would be given 200,000 rupiah ($21) each for clothes and household items while families would get 12 kg of rice. He said people would also be compensated for damaged homes.
© 2006 DPA | 
