Rescue continues
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Rescue efforts continued in Haiti on Saturday as the international community has been mobilized to provide the devastated island nation's earthquake survivors with medical assistance and other humanitarian aid.
In the first three days after the magnitude-7.3 earthquake struck on Tuesday, aid workers spared no efforts to find any signs of life. A number of people have been saved from the rubble of Haiti's capital city but in most cases, more bodies were pulled out of the rubbles.
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A volunteer treats an injured at a hospital in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, on Jan. 16, 2010. The hospital is full of the earthquake patients with insufficient medical care. [Yuan Man/Xinhua] |
As of early Friday, the Chilean search and rescue team rescued 23 people from the Montana Hotel.
Juan Gabriel Valdes, chief of the Chilean aid commission, said that rescue efforts would continue as long as there was hope of finding more people alive.
Meanwhile, the body of a Chinese peacekeeping police officer was found among the ruins of the collapsed building of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, Chinese search and rescue team leader Huang Jianfa said here early Saturday.
The rescue team was doing everything possible to speed up the search for seven other Chinese officers who remained missing.
There were 142 Chinese peace-keeping police officers in Haiti. The others have been accounted for.
The Haitian civil protection ministry said that more than 50,000 people have been estimated to have died in the quake, with the number possibly closer to 100,000.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said that it would take days to get the death toll, but the figure could be "very high."
The quake not only toppled government buildings in the capital city, but also shattered the Caribbean nation's fragile public service system, with many officials injured and more missing.
Rescue workers and humanitarian aid continued to arrive in Haiti but many of the capital's 3 million people remained without access to food, water, shelter and electricity.
Ban said in a telephone conversation with Haitian President Rene Preval on Friday that all relevant U.N. agencies had moved to deploy rescue work and the World Food Program has been distributing food to quake victims.
Ban said the U.N. had launched an urgent appeal for 550 million U.S. dollars.
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