Hundreds of bodies have been cremated amid fears of disease as flood waters partly receded yesterday in India's cyclone-hit eastern state of Orissa.
"We are cremating the badly decomposed bodies using kerosene and bleaching powder to see that infections don't spread," the state Health Minister, Mr Niranjan Patnaik, said.
State officials said they had recovered 3,401 bodies, with 2,464 deaths reported in Jagatsinghpur district.
However, they reported no signs so far of epidemics of water-borne diseases such as gastroenteritis and cholera. But thousands of people who drank contaminated water suffered from diarrhoea. "We have to be extremely careful in the next 10 days," Mr Patnaik said. "If the number of diarrhoea and gastroenteritis cases don't increase substantially, then we can safely assume that we have avoided a gigantic problem."