South Asia tsunami. Nuke policy leads India to build own network.

Foreign aid workers and Sri Lankans raced to provide basics such as clean drinking water and latrines. “The response of the government has been excellent,” Pole says. “They forgot all the usual bureaucracy and cleaned out their store.” Emergency supplies flowed to all the affected communities, including those in the northeast controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the rebels’ political arm. Lack of clean water is the deficiency felt most keenly. A high water table has flooded cesspools and tainted wells, says Bipin Verma, an emergency health expert in WHO’s Colombo office. In the days after the tsunami, local health officers rode around in trucks with megaphones ordering people to boil water. “Now people understand what they have to do,” Fazal says. Nutrition is a growing concern, says Verma. The price of vegetables has risen since the disaster, and Sri Lankans have been eating less fish out of the false fear that fish are contaminated by corpses in the water. The risk of vector-borne diseases still looms. “To me, that’s the biggest health threat,” says Verma. Dengue and malaria, both transmitted by mosquitoes, are endemic in Sri Lanka. WHO has borrowed 50 pesticide fogging machines and distributed them throughout the country. Chlorination, sanitation, vector control: Basic measures can save lives. “We don’t have to have new science to do this,” says Bradt.