Monitoring Desk
GENEVA: While promising long-term assistance, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday that the massive earthquake that have killed thousands in Syria and Turkiye could affect up to 23 million people.
“Event overview maps show that approximately 23 million people are exposed, including about five million vulnerable populations,” WHO’s senior emergencies officer Adelheid Marschang said.
She said, “Potentially, health infrastructure and civilian infrastructure have been destroyed across the affected region, mainly in northwest Syri and Turkiye.”
The WHO “considers that the important unmet needs in Syria may be the immediate and mid-term,” Marschang told the UN health agency’s executive committee in Geneva.
She spoke as rescuers in Syria, and Turkiye braved freezing cold, collapsing buildings, and aftershocks as they dug for survivors buried by a strong earthquake that killed over 5,000 people.
“Now, it is a race against time,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. He explained that the UN health agency urgently sent aid to the area.
“We are mobilizing emergency supplies and have activated the WHO emergency medical teams’ network to provide essential health care for the wounded and most vulnerable.”
Quake flattened thousands of buildings
Disaster agencies said many thousand buildings were flattened in cities across a vast Syria-Turkiye border region — pouring misery on a region already plagued by a recent cholera outbreak, war, insurgency, and refugee crises.
The situation is particularly dangerous in northern Syria, which has already been devastated by years of war.
“The movement of aid across the border into northwest Syria may be or is already hamperred due to the damage caused by the quake,” Marschang said.
She addressed a special meeting on the calamity, which held a minute’s silence for the quake victims.
The WHO chief resolved that the health agency would “work closely with all partners to help authorities in both countries in the crucial hours, and in the months and years to come as both Turkiye and Syria recover and rebuild.”
