Aid flights grounded for third day

An Indian Kashmiri man walks through the snow in Srinagar yesterday. Heavy snowfall in Indian Kashmir shut down key highways and lashed areas hit hard by the October 8, 2005 earthquake, which left some 1,300 people dead in Indian Kashmir and more than 150,000 homeless. PHOTO: AFP

Despite the bad weather, health agencies said they had seen no spike in numbers of sick people since the snow and rain started on Saturday night, nor any deaths related to the cold.

"There's been nothing over the last two days in terms of new patients coming in," International Committee of the Red Cross spokeswoman Jessica Barry said of the group's main field hospital in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir.

ICRC clinics had also seen no great rush, she said.

"There's been no leap, the signs are looking good," she said.

More than two million people have been living in tents or crude shelters patched together from their ruined homes since the Oct. 8 quake killed more than 73,000 people.

The World Health Organisation also said it had not seen any surge in the numbers sick people, despite more than a foot of snow that fell across the mountains and days of drenching, icy rain in the valleys after an unusually dry December.