Word: ketsana
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...Nearly 860 people were killed in flooding and landslides after Ketsana and typhoon Parma tore into Luzon, the country's largest island, in late September and early October. Four weeks later, sections of the city and some surrounding provinces are still underwater, and state-run hospitals have been overwhelmed by an outbreak of leptospirosis, a bacterial disease spread from the urine of infected rats and other animals. (In Sri Lanka, where there was a large outbreak in 2008, leptospirosis is known as "rat fever.") The bacterium is transmitted by the standing floodwater through cuts in the skin and by people...
...swerves his tricycle taxi to a stop just before the floodwater, lapping over a speed bump in the road. He knows the mud-colored water could be contaminated with a potentially deadly rat-borne disease that is still threatening communities in and around Manila a month after tropical storm Ketsana hit the Philippines' capital. "I saw the warnings on TV," says the lanky 19-year-old, watching pedestrians wade through the knee-high water covering part of a road in the capital's Pasig district, one of the worst flood-hit areas...
...underfunded public health system is poorly equipped to deal with large-scale disease outbreaks, even for diseases like leptospirosis that are seasonally common across the archipelago. Several large government hospitals were damaged in the flooding, and have struggled to cope with the influx of patients. A week after Ketsana, much of Pasig General Hospital was under water, including its laboratory. According to reports, staff initially only had dextrose to give flood victims seeking medical attention. In flood-ravaged Marikina, one of 16 cities that make up Metropolitan Manila, only four out of 21 public health facilities were in operation...
...Ketsana dropped more rainfall on greater Manila's 14 million residents in a nine-hour deluge than in an average month of the country's rainy season from July to November. At the height of the storm, 80% of the capital was underwater. The rainfall was exceptional, but the severity of the flooding was intensified by the city's garbage-clogged drainage system, partly from the shanties of informal settlers living along waterways and decades of skewed urban planning...
...additional $5.8 million in order to recruit and train 3,000 rangers to patrol protected lands. Even if they get the extra funding, for many of the forests in Vietnam's central highlands, and for the people whose villages now lie under a sea of mud, Typhoon Ketsana has revealed that the help will come too late...