KABUL, 18 February 2005 — A cold snap has claimed at least 267 lives in Afghanistan in the past month and thousands more people are thought to be stranded in remote areas, Afghan and UN officials said yesterday.
Many of the deaths were children under the age of five suffering from respiratory infections, pneumonia and whooping cough caused by the freezing conditions, Public Health Minister Mohammad Amin Fatimie told AFP.
“We can confirm some 105 people, mainly children, died of diseases throughout the country in the past one month,” Fatimie said.
At least 162 other people have died in avalanches, road accidents and collapsing mud-brick houses due to heavy snowfalls in the poverty-stricken rural areas, according to Afghan officials.
Twenty-three people have died in the eastern province of Nuristan, 15 in northeastern Badakhshan, 40 in southern Logar, 13 in central Deh Kundi, nine in central Uruzgan, and 46 in southwestern Paktia, a high-ranking official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Ten other people died on Monday when an avalanche hit their village in the mountainous Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, local officials said earlier. Six more died in an avalanche on a northern highway on Saturday.
Fatimie said that lives in 22 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, mainly in central, northern and northeastern regions, were under threat from the coldest winter in Afghanistan for six years.
