COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – Respiratory illnesses are emerging in many tsunami survivors here, but there is no sign of the widespread diseases such as cholera that many aid organizations feared would take more lives than the raging sea.

Although there have been cases of diarrhea, which can be deadly particularly to the very young and the elderly, there has not been a single case of cholera in Sri Lanka so far, according to Dr. Amal Harsha De Silva, director of private health sector development at the Ministry of Health.

The island nation has enough pharmaceuticals and more than enough doctors on hand, he said, leaving restoring infrastructure as the most pressing concern.

“Water and sanitation are the biggest issues we have on our hands,” he said, sitting in his downtown office, where nearly a dozen people waited for a word with him and the phones virtually never stopped ringing.

Illnesses such as pneumonia and lung inflammations have come from water being inhaled during the inundation a week ago, De Silva said. He noted that this is particularly true among women and children who were not strong enough to keep their heads above the water.

Another problem is minor injuries, such as scrapes and cuts, that become infected, he said.

Although corpses are being buried as swiftly as possible, De Silva said dead bodies do not pose a particularly grave threat to health. The greatest danger would be nitrogen poisoning from mass graves leaching into groundwater, but that would be relatively rare, he said.

Provincial health officials have attempted to identify bodies before burial but have not succeeded in all cases.

“Some of them we could not identify, so we take photos. That is all we have,” he said, noting that in some cases fingerprints also were taken but that method became too difficult to do for every body.

The photos of anonymous corpses are posted in district government offices in the hopes that identifications will be made.

As of Thursday, the last day official figures were compiled, Sri Lanka had an estimated 665,951 displaced people, many of them living in the 770 refugee camps set up around the country.

Thousands of refugees must be transferred from shelters in schools before the start of the new academic term Jan. 10. The government has said the schools must reopen on time to restore a sense of normalcy for the children.

As a result, provincial groups and aid organizations are scrambling to arrange new quarters for refugees.

In the Kalutara district south of Colombo, for example, officials are turning schools with low student populations into new shelters and transferring the pupils to other schools, according to Dr. U.K.D. Piyaseeli, acting director of the National Institute of Health Services in Kalutara.

Among the next health challenges, she said, will be to identify and address psychological problems among survivors, particularly children.

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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-01-03-05 1912EST