BANGKOK -- Myanmar may be on the brink of a second disaster, "potentially larger than the first," but this time self-inflicted.

More than a week after cyclone Nargis hit, the Myanmar government's continued refusal to allow more than a trickle of aid into the country and no experienced disaster relief workers has upped the chance of disease wiping out more people than the cyclone and the tidal surge that followed it.

The regime now says 28,458 are dead and 33,416 missing, but international agencies put the death toll much higherand the UN warned yesterday that it could hit 150,000 if aid doesn't start flowing soon.

Gordon Bacon, the International Rescue Committee emergency co-ordinator in Yangon, said his teams are starting to penetrate some of the areas worst hit by Nargis and they are finding villages where all the homes are destroyed and survivors who have had no clean water since May 2.

"With each passing day, we come closer to a massive health disaster and a second wave of deaths that is potentially larger than the first," Bacon said.

In Thailand, the IRC's regional director Greg Beck said: "Everything hinges on access. Unless there's a massive and fast infusion of aid, experts and supplies into the hardest-hit areas, there's going to be a tragedy at an unimaginable scale.

"Until now, both governments and aid agencies have been excessively careful when they talked about the disaster in Myanmar. They obviously did not want to cause panic, but neither did they want to anger the country's paranoid regime while there is still hope of access to one of the world's most isolated countries.

By telephone from a hotel in Yangon where he has set up temporary headquarters after Nargis destroyed his offices, Brian Agland, country director for CARE International, said his workers have been interviewing survivors who have collected in makeshift camps in the Irrawaddy Delta area and hearing repeated stories of villages of 400 or so people where only three or four people survived.

He said the survivors they are seeing are mostly adults: "A lot of the dead are children and elderly."

Canwest News Service -Published: Monday, May 12, 2008