Floods cause chaos

No, not here. In India 56 have died and there have been 3 million affected in over 1700 villages in the Bihar region and Nepal has also been affected. The WHO page is here and gives an update on the crisis.

The information available on the WHO site is remarkable. The South East Asia Regional Office have detailed reports (India and Nepal) on the current situation. It goes as far as to list individual camps with numbers of people, those pregnant or post-partum and also any disabled refugees with how many wells and toilets to which they have access.

One of the hardest things about absorbing information on the WHO site is that the numbers de-humanise the suffering. I guess it is the same with many of these situations. Of course, television pictures help but it can be hard to raise an emotional response. Reading the names of schools being used as camps helped me bring it back a little. Try substituting your local primary school name and then imagine your entire local population sheltering there.

The first things these people need is clean water, somewhere to crap and the kids need an emergency measles immunisation programme. And food and shelter of course. This is a standard response to a humanitarian crises but it is interesting as most people would not immediately think of the measles. It can tear through the child population and I have commented before on the potential for measles to kill. I always finds the WHO helps give me a bit of perspective and this damp week is no exception.

Incidentally, I am not aware of any evidence that our MMR catch-up programme and an increase in measles cases is in any way related to the sodden British summer.