In the hours before her six-year-old son died in her lap, Badar Bibi recalled how she rushed from a field clinic set up to treat people caught in Pakistan's worst floods in decades to a city hospital, desperate to bring down the boy's fever.
First she took Abdul Qadeer to a makeshift medical centre set up by the air force, where doctors managed to bring down his temperature from 106 Fahrenheit. They also helped her get a tuk-tuk to rush him to the hospital in the nearby city of Sehwan.
But he is one of hundreds of children who have died in the deluge that has devastated large parts of Pakistan's southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan, either drowned as waters flooded homes or struck by diseases, some of them water-borne. Bibi's family managed to escape to safety in mid-August after raging floods swamped her village in Mehar, Sindh. It is now submerged, and residents say even two-storey houses are barely visible above the water.
Health departments data from the other three provinces of Pakistan also show thousands of patients from flood-hit areas have gone to hospitals and clinics each day. Displaced families are in need of access to clean drinking water, shelter, food, toilets, medical help and medicine.
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