GENEVA, Jan 25 (AFP) - A major epidemic in the areas hit by last month's tsunami disaster is "very, very unlikely" thanks to the work of governments and aid agencies to help the victims, a top World Health Organisation official said on Tuesday.
"It is my belief that the collective effort of the governments, the aid agencies and local communities has together created a situation where we will not get a second wave of deaths," said Dr David Nabarro, representative to the WHO's director general for health action in crisis.
"We've now got the systems in place to make it very, very unlikely that we will get any enormous outbreak of diseases," he told a news conference in Geneva.
Just after the catastrophe struck on December 26, as the death toll hit about 50,000 people, Nabarro warned that the risk of epidemics threatened to kill more people that the tsunami itself.
As the latest Asian-wide count of presumed dead from the Indian Ocean disaster exceeded 280,000, Nabarro insisted that some 50,000 people among the five million displaced by the giant wave had been at risk of dying from disease in the the weeks immediately following.
He defended the WHO's warnings at the time, noting that they ensured "public health issues were put right in the front of the response", with much attention being focused on ensuring people in the worst hit areas had access to drinking water and portable toilets.
"If you don't warn of a risk and something happens, you get blamed in a big way," said Nabarro.
"I do not think we cried too loud, I think we did the right thing," he continued, noting that the rapid response helped to save 50,000 people who might have otherwise died.
In the coming weeks and months, "we must remain vigilant but we must also keep on a high state of alert so that we can respond in case there are further unpleasant outbreaks," cautioned the doctor.
At the same time, he noted that emphasis was shifting in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, which bore the brunt of the crisis, to dealing with psychological problems related to the tsunami.
We "need to make certain that we treat psychological trauma with as much attention as we do communicable diseases," he said.
01/25/2005 15:00 GMT - AFP