ISLAMABAD, October 21, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf blasted Friday, October 21, world aid offers to Islamabad, saying the amount of foreign reconstruction aid pledged after the devastating quake is "totally inadequate".

Musharraf told the BBC that Pakistan needed about five billion US dollars to rebuild the devastated areas of the quake but the international community had pledged only about $620 million.

The comments came only one day after the United Nations urged the world to set up a massive Berlin Airlift-style helicopter operation to prevent a second wave of deaths in the South Asian country, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.

More than 51,300 people died in the October 8 quake and more than three million people remain homeless, mostly in the northern Himalayan foothills of Kashmir with winter just around the corner.

UN emergency relief chief Jan Egeland has asked NATO to stage a massive airlift of those left homeless by the quake to help alleviate the scale of devastation in the South Asian country.

The 26-nation alliance, which began flying in 900 tons of aid Thursday, is considering the demand, but says it would need to muster more helicopters, according to Reuters.

"Up to 1,000 on the ground is possible," the NATO official said, when asked how many troops NATO was preparing to send.

The official said it would include an engineering battalion, plus additional staff, but that NATO nations still needed to give the plan an approval.

Survivors face great risks. (Reuters)

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday donors had only made firm commitments for 12 percent of the 312 million dollars needed right away after the tragedy.

Major General Shaukat Sultan, Musharraf's spokesman, however, said that the president was only referring to the reconstruction aid, not the initial appeal for aid and rescue teams.

"We have to divide into two parts -- one is the relief and the second is reconstruction. He said that the response of the international community in the context of rescue and relief have been commendable," Sultan said.

"It is reconstruction where the pledges are highly inadequate because reconstruction would require billions of dollars... for houses, infrastructure, hospitals, schools, colleges and police stations, roads and bridges.

"It is this part where the pledges so far are inadequate. That is why there is a donor conference in Geneva after a few days."

Meanwhile, fears ran high of post-quake infectious diseases in Pakistan after five people had died from tetanus in the aftermath of the devastating quake, AFP said.

"Five deaths from tetanus have been reported" among people who were evacuated from devastated northern Pakistan and Kashmir to hospitals in the capital Islamabad and nearby Rawalpindi," Pakistani health secretary Anwar Mahmood said.

"We are treating another 42 tetanus cases and they might increase. People who have been recovered late are developing it," he added.

The World Health Organization had also informed Pakistan of "cases of diarrhea and a few cases of tetanus" in the ruined northern city of Balakot, battalion commander Colonel Saeed Iqbal told AFP.

Pakistan had a stock of 4,000 doses of anti-tetanus globulin, an expensive medicine used to cure patients who have caught the disease, the health ministry said.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) warned that the untreated wounds of injured Pakistanis were turning serious for survivors two weeks after the disaster.

"If they are left for weeks with no proper treatment, these wounds are becoming more infectious, more necrotic," Krist Tierlinck, MSF emergency coordinator for the devastated Pakistani Kashmir town of Bagh.

"You are coming down to even a small case from the beginning of the relief effort is now really a bad case to operate because it took these people time to get to a proper health facility," he told reporters in Islamabad.