Floods continue to inundate southern Pakistan

Almost 1 million people have been displaced since midweek in Sindh Province, adding to the estimated 6 million already made homeless countrywide over the last three weeks in Pakistan’s worst floods in living memory. Waters have forced the evacuation of several areas around the town of Thatta, near the southern coast, and more people farther north where efforts to protect the town of Shahdad Kot have failed, officials said.

Relief workers say they have reached more than 2 million people with emergency assistance, including food, clean water, and medicine, but they acknowledge that the crisis is expanding faster than they can provide help.

“In the last 48 hours another 1 million people have been displaced,’’ said Maurizio Giuliano, a UN spokesman in Islamabad. “It is quite crucial, and it has been growing in the last 24 to 48 hours.’’

More than a half-million people were evacuated from three districts near Thatta, many of them on foot when flood waters breached embankments in two places Thursday afternoon, said Fawad Hussein, a field officer for the UN humanitarian mission in Sindh Province.

Many have taken refuge in Thatta, even though it also remains under threat, and on high ground nearby at a place called Makli.

Although the Pakistani Army was trying hard to hold the embankments, they warned people to evacuate in the afternoon, but there was not enough transport for them and many had to walk long into the night, Hussein said. “People really struggled,’’ he said, speaking by telephone from the region. “They just could not walk; there were pregnant women and children.’’

Those with transport have moved to the main cities in the region, Karachi and Hyderabad, swelling the camps already set up there, he said.

Health workers setting up clinics in the major centers of displacement reported a sharp increase in cases of acute diarrhea. Of 3.3 million people treated at clinics and hospitals in the flood-affected areas over the last three weeks, 13 percent — or 430,117 people — had acute diarrhea, said Paul Garwood, spokesman for the World Health Organization in Islamabad.

The numbers represent an increase of 30 percent compared with the same period last year, he said.

In just one 24-hour period from Sunday to Monday, 71,753 people were treated for acute diarrhea — or 16 percent of all patients treated in the flood areas.

A high incidence of malaria is also being reported in the southern provinces, Garwood said.

There are no available figures of fatalities among the displaced people, but aid organizations and local news networks have been reporting some deaths in the camps and among the displaced.