China relief workers buried by mudslide
More than 200 relief workers have been buried by a mudslide in earthquake-hit Sichuan province, a Chinese state news agency said today.
The Xinhua News Agency did not immediately have any other details.
The incident came as the Chinese government declared a three-day period of mourning for the May 12 quake. It is estimated that the earthquake killed as many as 50,000 people.
Flags flew at half-mast, public entertainment was cancelled and 1.3 billion people were asked to observe a three-minute silence as the period of mourning began.
Officials asked for the horns of cars, trains and ships and air raid sirens to sound at 2.28pm (7.28am Irish time) - exactly a week after the earthquake hit.
The Olympic torch relay - a potent symbol of national pride in the countdown to August's much anticipated Beijing Games - was also suspended during the mourning period.
The national flag in Tiananmen Square, which is raised in a solemn ceremony every morning at dawn, fluttered at half-mast. State television repeatedly broadcast the ceremony. Also to mark the three-day mourning period, the mastheads of all newspapers were printed in black.
The mourning period began as hope of finding more trapped survivors dwindled, and preventing hunger and disease among the homeless became more pressing.
As the second week of China's worst disaster in a generation started, the hunt for survivors in the rubble turned glum despite remarkable survival tales among thousands who were buried.
"It will soon be too late (to find trapped survivors)," said Koji Fujiya, deputy leader of a Japanese rescue team working in Beichuan, a town reduced to rubble. His team pulled 10 bodies out of Beichuan's high school yesterday in the northern part of Sichuan province.
The steady run of rescue news flashed by the official Xinhua News Agency has slowed, with just three such rescues reported yesterday, including a woman in Yingxiu town who was reached by soldiers who dug a five-yard tunnel through the wreckage of a flattened power station and had to amputate both her legs to set her free, after 150 hours.
Dozens of aftershocks have rumbled through the region, extending the damage and stretching the already jangled nerves of survivors.
With more corpses discovered, the confirmed death toll rose to 32,476, the State Council, China's Cabinet, reported. The injured numbered more than 220,000.
Many bodies lay by roadsides in body bags or wrapped in plastic sheeting, as authorities struggled to dig burial pits and crematoriums worked overtime.
The World Health Organisation warned that shortages of clean water and warmer, humid weather in Sichuan province - which bore the brunt of the earthquake - were ripe for epidemics. It urged officials not to be distracted by the false belief that corpses were a health threat.
"Ensuring supply of food and safe drinking water and trying to restore good sanitation are critical because these are basic transmission routes for communicable diseases," said Hans Troedsson, WHO's representative to China.
Experts said that while seeing dead bodies left in the open after a disaster can cause distress, they pose little health risk because the micro-organisms responsible for decomposition cannot cause disease and other germs in the body die quickly after their host.
The Health Ministry said no major epidemics or other public health hazards had been reported so far, Xinhua said. It said two field hospitals with 400 beds have been set up in isolated areas and medical staff had reached all townships affected by the quake.
It was the most extensive mourning period the government has ordered since the death 11 years ago of Communist patriarch Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the free-market reforms that have brought many Chinese from poverty to moderate prosperity in a generation.
According to sina.com, a Chinese news portal, the government order said all internet entertainment and game sections had to be taken down and users redirected to sites dedicated to commemorating earthquake victims.
China has raised the magnitude of last Monday's quake to 8.0 from 7.8, although it did not give reasons for the reassessment.
The US Geological Survey kept its 7.9 measure. A magnitude-8 quake has the equivalent energy of 790 nuclear bombs, according to the US organisation.
