People cool themselves off at a stream in Islamabad, Pakistan as temperatures rose during Ramadan yesterday.
/AP photo
Karachi – More than 450 people have died from a three-day heat wave in southern Pakistan, officials said yesterday, as medics battled to treat victims after a state of emergency was declared in hospitals.
The death toll in the worst-hit city of Karachi, where temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius at the weekend, was 450 while about another 10 people died in other parts of southern Sindh province, said Sabir Memon, a senior provincial health official.
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The deaths came as the overwhelmingly Muslim country of around 200 million people observes the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, during which eating and drinking is forbidden from sunrise to sunset.
Semi Jamali, a doctor at Karachi’s largest hospital said they had treated about 3,000 patients.
“More than 200 of them were either received dead or died in hospital,” Jamali told AFP.
Another 67 people died in the Civil Hospital, an official there said.
Pakistan’s largest social welfare organization, Edhi Foundation, said their two morgues in the city had received more than 400 corpses.
“More than 400 dead bodies have so far been received in our two mortuaries in past three days,” Edhi spokesman Anwar Kazmi told AFP. “The mortuaries have reached capacity.”
In Karachi, a city of 20 million people, electricity shortages have crippled the water supply system, hampering the pumping of millions of gallons of water to consumers, the state-run water utility said.
Pakistan’s Meteorological Office said temperatures remained at around 44.5 Celsius in Karachi on Tuesday but forecast thunderstorms for the evening./AFP
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