Paranoid junta fiddles as suffering citizens wait for food, water, help

It emerged late last night the UN has halted aid shipments into Burma after the military junta seized the contents of the only two mercy flights to arrive yesterday.

News of the seizures comes amid growing fears that the death toll could even overtake 2004 Boxing Day tsunami levels unless urgent action is taken to help those left homeless by Cyclone Nargis, reports say.

The seized food, water and equipment would have helped 95,000 people, a fraction of the 1.5 million estimated to be in need of life-saving assistance.

Certain death

If doctors had been able to attend two-month-old Kyaw Zin Law a day after the cyclone, or three days after, or even yesterday, his life could have been saved. Now he will surely die.

His strength-sapping, stomach-bloating illness is certainly something treatable: malaria, parasites or perhaps a simple case of malnutrition.

But since the cyclone drowned his neighbours and destroyed his home, there have been no doctors in this part of Burma, and Kyaw Zin Law has little time to live, the Times reports on its website

A midwife, armed with nothing more than paracetamol and cough drops, cares for the infant as best she can. It is hard to believe he'll live out the week.

Lives after the cyclone hit are bordering on the impossible. Everyone is without aid and assistance and must fend for themselves as best they can.

Than Win, 41, from the town of Bogalay, which lies in the heart of the Irrawaddy delta some 100 kilometres southwest of Rangoon, lost seven of her 10 children to Nargis, but she has now given birth to her 11th child amid the devastation of the delta.

Having survived the storm surge by clinging for two hours to a tree beside her house, Than Win went into labour at dusk, just as the first medical team arrived in the area. An hour later, she gave birth to the child, according the Telegraph.

Situation critical

News agencies report Noeleen Heyzer, under-secretary general of the UN for the Asia Pacific, is among many urging Burma's rulers to issue aid workers with visas, which have so far mostly been withheld by the reclusive regime.

"The situation is getting critical, and there is only a small window of opportunity if we are to avert the spread of diseases that could multiply the already tragic number of casualties," Heyzer says.

The death toll is rising all the time while official estimates put the dead and missing at as many as 60,000. Aid workers and embassy officials say the death toll could top 100,000.

Burma says in its state-run press it is "not ready" for foreign search-and-rescue teams after the deadly cyclone, announcing that some aid workers have been deported.