Bangaon, West Bengal border, June 6
As the cholera death toll in West Bengal approached the 5,000 mark today overworked Indian doctors at border points claimed that an even greater epidemic was raging in East Pakistan, where medical facilities are nonexistent.

The doctors claimed that an increasing number of Bengalis who were affected by the disease were crossing the border every day for treatment in Indian hospitals. Yesterday the Indian border security force sealed off sections of the Shikarpur border in the Nadia district where cholera victims, some of them carrying their dead and the dying on handcarts, have been crossing the frontier during the past few days.

A senior official of the health department at Nadia told me yesterday: "There is growing evidence that the epidemic is raging on the other side of the border. I hate to think what will happen because most of the patients from East Bengal have told us that there are no doctors available and that many of the hospitals have closed."

To add to the misery of the refugees the monsoon rains broke over eastern India yesterday. It is felt here that only massive effort by the international community will save the lives of millions of homeless Bengalis who are living in mud, slush, and ankle-deep water.

In the meantime large cargoes of medicine and medical equipment are being flown to India from all parts of the world but it would appear that the aid has come too late.

I discovered yesterday that Indian health authorities have not been able to contain the epidemic in the affected Nadia district and cholera has spread to the Bangaon border town in the adjoining district of 24 Parganas and a temporary refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta.

The Press Trust of India news-agency also reported today that 300 people have died of starvation in the Rangpur district of East Bengal while officials in charge of the refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta confirmed reports that 20 people had died of cholera and another 100 had contracted the disease there.

The disease is spreading rapidly to other towns and refugee camps. Significantly inhabitants have already been infected by the disease in Krishnagar.

At Bangaon, which was previously unaffected, I found that 300 cases of cholera had been admitted to the hospital during the past three days. Twenty people have died of the disease in the Bangaon district hospital but the doctors claim that a great number of people must be dying in the jungles and next to the roadside.

The doctors are working against impossible odds and victims are dying in the hospital under horrifying conditions.

As we entered the cholera wards we stepped over a dying patient who was lying across the steps of the verandah, He lay on the bare floor with no covering except for a tattered pair of short pants. He was in a pitiful emaciated state and had been brought to hospital from the frontier in a rickshaw. He had been dumped across the step an hour ago but the nurses and doctors were too busy to care for him.

Dr B. K. Mallick, who is in charge of the cholera cases, says he has had to accommodate 150 patients in a 12-bed ward. Three tents have been erected behind the hospital to accommodate the extra patients.

The ward consisted of a small gloomy room about 20ft by 20ft in size. There were four beds in the ward but most of the 30 patients lay side by side on the floor. There were no mattresses or blankets and most of them lay motionless on the hard floor. A sweeper moved among them mopping up the excrement. In the one corner a dying baby purged himself on the floor. In the other corner nurses were desperately attempting to insert the large needle of an adult transfusion set into the collapsed veins of a 10-month-old baby.

"The infant mortality rate is very high. We don't have baby transfusion sets and it is almost impossible to insert adult needles into the small collapsed veins of the babies ", Dr Mallick said. He pointed to the three tents outside the hospital. "I have had to put other patients in there. I hate to think what will happen when the monsoon rains flood this piece of land. They are all sleeping on the ground."

He has so far saved scores of lives working under these impossible conditions and without adequate supplies of saline and other medicines. But many of the patients are almost dead when they arrive in the hospital. " Most of them have walked a hundred miles or so. They are suffering from malnutrition, they are usually completely dehydrated and are virtually pulse-less when they are brought here ", the doctor said.

Like his colleagues in other border hospitals Dr. Mallick suspects that a cholera epidemic is raging across the border. "Some of the cases have come from the overcrowded border camps but doctors have found that an increasing number of people are now coming across the frontier for treatment. They say that there are no medical facilities there." Dr Mallick and Dr A. K. Bhattacharya, surgeon in charge of Bangaon hospital are aware that medical supplies and vaccines are being rushed to West Bengal from all corners of the world. But claimed that the aid has come too late.

"The refugees have been coming across at the rate of 100,000 a day and as many as 10,000 people have been crowded into camps designed for 2,000 people. Anyone could predict that an epidemic was
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Refugees cower from monsoon

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bound to break out. But nobody bothered. No representatives of foreign embassies or world health organizations have been here yet and no one can imagine the magnitude of this tragedy until he sees it with his own eyes. Do people have to die like flies before the world sits up?" the angry surgeon said.

After a brief respite today the monsoon rains began to fall again. The rains are expected to beat down on Bengal for several months, flooding vast areas of the province, and worried health officials believe that an innumerable variety of diseases, exposure and starvation might claim an unpredictable number of lives in the coming months.

In spite of the heroic efforts by the Indian Government, the situation is out of control and It is learnt that diplomats and the representatives of British relief organizations are urging Mr Heath to send Mr Wood, Minister of Overseas Development, out to West Bengal immediately to assess the situation himself.

Only half of the estimated 4.5 million men, women and children who have crossed into India in recent weeks have been accommodated in the 500 odd official refugee camps dotted around the border. The remaining two million people have no shelter and are living under grass mats, trees, flimsy huts and, in many cases, under umbrellas on the roadside.

Within hours of the first heavy downpour yesterday many of the refugee camps were flooded in ankle deep water and millions of people spent the night squatting in mud and slush. Sanitation is non-existent and it is feared that the rain will soon spread cholera and other diseases throughout the region.

I drove for 200 miles around the border town yesterday and saw nearly a million people squatting in mud or marching in the rain. Some were frantically attempting to build shelters out of leaves and branches but the huts, looking more like inverted half-completed bird's nests, failed to protect the occupants from the lightest shower.

By nightfall almost every form of shelter for hundreds of miles had been taken over by the thin and terrified men, women and children. They were squatting on almost every verandah and shopdoor in the towns and villages along the road to the border. On the outskirts of Barasat I saw a family sheltering with pigs in a crude sty.
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