MANDALAY: A massive earthquake that rocked Myanmar could exacerbate hunger and disease outbreaks in a country already wracked by food shortages, mass displacement and civil war, aid groups and the United Nations warned Monday. The official death toll climbed past 1,700, but the true figure is feared to be much higher.
Meanwhile, hundreds of patients, including babies, the elderly and Buddhist monks, lay on gurneys in a hospital car park in the sweltering heat of Mandalay, a city still living in fear of aftershocks.
Mandalay General Hospital — the city’s main medical facility — has around 1,000 beds but despite high heat and humidity, most patients were being treated outside in the wake of the massive earthquake that killed more than 2,000 people in Myanmar and neighboring Thailand.
Friday’s 7.7-magnitude quake was followed by repeated aftershocks that rattled Mandalay over the weekend, and patients were being kept outside in case more tremors cause damage inside.
“This is a very, very imperfect condition for everyone,” one medic said. “We’re trying to do what we can here,” he added. “We are trying our best.”
As temperatures soared to 39 degrees Celsius, patients sheltered under a thin tarpaulin rigged up to protect them from the fierce tropical sun.
Relatives took the hands of their loved ones, trying to comfort them, or wafted them with bamboo fans.
Small children with scrapes cried amid the miserable conditions, while an injured monk lay on a gurney, hooked up to a drip.
It is not only the patients that are suffering. Medics sat cross-legged on the ground, trying to recuperate during breaks in their exhausting shifts.
Although the hospital building itself has not been visibly affected, only a handful of patients who need intensive care, and the doctors who look after them, remain inside.
The rest crammed themselves under the tarpaulin, or a shelter close by with a corrugated iron roof surrounded by motorbikes.
Fear of aftershocks is widespread across the city, with many people sleeping out in the streets since the quake, either unable to return home or too nervous to do so.

Some have tents but many, including young children, have simply bedded down on blankets in the middle of the roads, trying to keep as far from buildings as possible for fear of falling masonry.

GENEVA: A halt to funding for Gavi, an organization that vaccinates children in the world’s poorest countries, will leave a dangerous gap threatening the lives of millions, its chief warned on Monday.
“The first impact would be for the world’s most vulnerable children,” Gavi CEO Sania Nishtar said.
She spoke via video link from Washington, during a visit to convince US authorities that their 25-year collaboration with the Geneva-based organization must continue. The New York Times broke the news last week that the US aims to cut all funding to Gavi. That step featured in a 281-page spreadsheet related to USAID cuts sent to the US Congress.
The decision would impact about 14 percent of Gavi’s core budget — and came just days after Congress had approved $300 million in funding for the organization.

“I was very, very surprised,” Nishtar said, adding that her organization still had received no official termination notice from the US government.
If the cuts go ahead, Nishtar warned, it would have devastating effects.
“Frankly, this is too big a hole to be filled,” Nishtar warned, even as Gavi scrambled to find donors to offset the missing US funding.
“Something will have to be cut.”
Gavi says it helps vaccinate more than half the world’s children against infectious diseases, including COVID-19, Ebola, malaria, rabies, polio, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid, and yellow fever.
Since its inception in 2000, Gavi has provided vaccines to more than 1.1 billion children in 78 lower-income countries, “preventing more than 18.8 million future deaths,” it says.
Before the US decision, the organization aimed to vaccinate 500 million more children between 2026 and 2030.
The US contribution is directly responsible for funding 75 million of those vaccinations, Nishtar said.
Without them, “around 1.3 million children will die from vaccine-preventable diseases.”
Beyond Gavi’s core immunization programs, the funding cut would jeopardize the stockpiling and roll-out of vaccines against outbreaks and health emergencies, including Ebola, cholera, and mpox.
“The world’s ability to protect itself against outbreaks and health emergencies will be compromised,” Nishtar said.
During her Washington visit, the Gavi chief said she aimed to show how effective funding has been for her organization.
For every $1 spent on vaccinations in developing countries where Gavi operates, $21 will be saved this decade in “health care costs, lost wages and lost productivity from illness and death,” the vaccine group estimates.
Unlike other organizations facing cuts, Gavi has not received an outsized contribution from Washington toward its budget, Nishtar noted, insisting that the US contribution was proportionate to its share of the global economy.
She said that other donors were paying their “fair share,” while recipient countries also pitched in and provided a path to transition away from receiving aid.
Some former recipients, like Indonesia, had even become donors to the program, she pointed out, hoping that such arguments would help sway Washington to stay the course.
Without the US backing, “we will have to make difficult trade-offs,” Nishtar warned.
That “will leave us all more exposed.”