Nepal earthquake death toll exceeds 7,000
 At least 14,023 people injured; 1000 Europeans still missing; Thousands waiting for aid Nepal ruled out the possibility Saturday of finding more survivors buried in the rubble from a massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake as the death toll formally exceeded 7,000 people. One week on from Nepal's deadliest quake in over 80 years, hopes of detecting more signs of life among the ruins had all but disappeared and the focus was shifting to reaching survivors in far-flung areas who have yet to receive relief supplies. The UN children's fund UNICEF warned of a race against time to avert an outbreak of disease among the 1.7 million youngsters, with monsoon rains just a few weeks away. "It has already been one week since the disaster," said home ministry spokesman Laxmi Prasad Dhakal. "We are trying our best in rescue and relief work but now I don't think that there is any possibility of survivors under the rubble." Dhakal put the number of injured at 14,023. While multiple teams of rescuers from more than 20 countries have been using sniffer dogs and heat-seeking equipment to find survivors in the rubble, no one has been pulled alive since Thursday evening. More than 100 people were also killed in neighbouring India and China. The exact scale of the disaster was still to emerge, with the mountainous terrain in the vast Himalayan nation complicating the relief effort. The numbers of foreigners who have died was also unclear with around 1,000 EU citizens still unaccounted for. |
