MYANMAR: Myanmar formally appealed Tuesday for international help in tackling massive floods with rescuers struggling to reach isolated regions, as rain-battered Asian nations counted the rising cost of this year’s monsoon.

Flash floods and landslides in Myanmar have claimed at least 46 lives and affected some 215,000 people, swallowing huge tracts of land in what the United Nations has described as a “major natural disaster.” Tens of thousands of people remain cut off as officials warn that swollen rivers are now threatening to inundate low-lying southern areas of the country.

“Myanmar authorities have today formally requested international assistance,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement, adding that the UN and other aid agencies have however been part of the response since late July.

Military helicopters and commercial airlines have helped deliver international food aid as Myanmar shows a willingness to allow foreign assistance that was unthinkable under the paranoid former junta.

In 2008 the military regime was widely criticized for refusing foreign aid for weeks after Cyclone Nargis wrought devastation across the Irrawaddy Delta, leaving nearly 140,000 people dead or missing.

Now, with a fast-growing troop of social media users, the quasi-civilian government has already come under attack for its flood response, accused of underplaying the scale of the disaster.

Government spokesman Ye Htut told AFP that Myanmar had sent an official list of requirements to the UN on Tuesday as the scale of the crisis was overwhelming local recovery efforts.

“We responded immediately. But in some areas there are no resources, such as boats to rescue people,” he said, adding that parts of the northern Sagaing region were seeing their “worst natural disaster in 100 years.”