Quake Survivors Now Mired in Squalor

"This place is like hell," said the 26-year-old paramedic from Frankfurt. "People are living together in squalor. Everyone is coughing, and the babies get sicker every day.

"I cannot imagine how they will survive. Hell cannot be any worse than this."

Situated on the site of a destroyed government college, it's known as the Old Government Camp. The name is misleading because neither the government nor any other relief group had anything to do with the impromptu compound until a team of German doctors stumbled upon it last week.

What the team found was an unsightly collection of 350 tents and more than 2,000 people that sprang up on a dirt-caked cricket field days after last month's magnitude 7.6 earthquake.

Although scores of camps housing tens of thousands of refugees in the city are run by the Pakistani government and domestic or foreign relief groups, Old Government Camp had no sponsor. People just began showing up there and erecting their hovels.

Without help from Pakistani soldiers and international aid officials, conditions at the unsanctioned site quickly deteriorated -- worsened by cold nights and days of rain.

Doctors blame the outbreak of infectious disease, including hundreds of cases of diarrhea and acute respiratory infections, on a shortage of toilets, foul drinking water and the occupants' close quarters.

The German medical team, from the group Humanity First, discovered the camp after arriving in Muzaffarabad a week ago.

Its members reported the situation to foreign health officials, who said they did not even know that the camp existed. Since then, several groups have rushed to the camp and have been shocked by the squalor.

"These are deplorable, appalling sanitation conditions -- absolutely and completely inadequate," said Dr. John Watson, a communicable disease monitor for the World Health Organization in Muzaffarabad.

"There has been no access to latrines. People are relieving themselves indiscriminately. This is a recipe for an epidemic."