Three women and two children were pulled from the rubble of the deadly earthquake in Turkey on Wednesday as rescue efforts shifted to getting relief to survivors.
Britain announced an extra £25m for tents, blankets and medical supplies for families made homeless in freezing conditions, while US secretary of state Antony Blinken will visit the country next week to see American aid efforts.
Rescuers could be seen applauding and embracing each other as an ambulance carried away a 74-year-old woman rescued in Kahramanmaras, while earlier in the day a 46-year-old woman was rescued in the same city, close to the epicentre of the quake.
Later, a woman named Ela and her children Meysam and Ali were pulled from the rubble of an apartment block in Antakya.
The combined death toll in Turkey and Syria has climbed to more than 41,000, and millions are in need of humanitarian aid, with many survivors having been left homeless in near-freezing winter temperatures. Rescues are now few and far between.
Focus has shifted to supporting survivors, and with much of the region’s sanitation infrastructure damaged or rendered inoperable by the earthquake, health authorities face a daunting task in trying to ensure that people now remain disease-free.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday it was particularly concerned about the welfare of people in northwestern Syria, a rebel-held region with little access to aid. It asked Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to open more border crossing points with Turkey to allow aid to get through.
Stories of how people survived for days buried under the rubble have also begun to emerge.
Huseyin Berber, a 62-year-old diabetic, survived for 187 hours after the collapsing walls of his home were propped up by a fridge and a cabinet, leaving him an armchair to sit in and a rug to keep him warm. He had a single bottle of water, and when that ran out he drank his own urine, he said from a bed in Mersin City Hospital.
“I shouted, shouted and shouted. No one was hearing me. I shouted so much that my throat hurt ... Someone reached their hand out and it met with my hand. They pulled me out from there. The hole I got out from was very small. That scared me a bit.”
In Kahramanmaras, homeless families slept in tents set up on the field and running track of the city’s stadium. Many are worried about the lack of sanitation.
“We haven’t been able to rinse off since the earthquake,” said Mohammad Emin, a 21-year-old graphic design student.
Batyr Berdyklychev, the World Health Organisation representative in Turkey, has warned that the water shortage in quake-hit areas “increases the risk of waterborne diseases and outbreaks of communicable diseases.”
Across the border in Syria, relief efforts have been hampered by a civil war that has splintered the country and divided regional and global powers.
“It’s clear that the zone of greatest concern at the moment is the area of northwestern Syria,” Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, told a briefing in Geneva. “The impact of the earthquake in areas of Syria controlled by the government is significant, but the services are there and there is access to those people.”
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
