MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan -- A top UN official urged the world yesterday to step up efforts to reach as many as three million people left homeless by the South Asian earthquake, and the deaths of three survivors from tetanus reinforced fears that disease and infected injuries will drive the death toll of 79,000 far higher.
In Geneva, Jan Egeland, the UN relief co-ordinator, said he was appealing to NATO and other potential donors to step in with "a second Berlin air bridge" of helicopters flying in relief supplies and evacuating perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.
He said he could foresee non-stop flights reminiscent of the airlift of supplies to West Berlin in the late 1940s when Soviet forces cut the city off from the West.
NATO is expected today to approve the dispatch of medics and military engineers to clear roads and help reconstruction.
Helicopters loaded with aid and soldiers on foot fanned out from the shattered city of Muzaffarabad in the heart of the earthquake zone in a frantic attempt to get help to remote Himalayan villages damaged in the Oct. 8 earthquake.
The World Health Organization said there have been 17 cases of tetanus in the quake-stricken area, three of them resulting in deaths in the town of Balakot in North West Frontier Province.
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