Delivering food (Reuters) – an elderly couple walks to deliver food to their relatives who are victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Minamisanriku City in Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan.

OTSUCHI, Japan (Reuters) – nearly a week after their home town was annihilated in a catastrophic tsunami, the 1,000-plus survivors of the small Japanese fishing town of Otsuchi are hanging by a thread.

With no water or electricity, and scant food, survivors keep each other company at one of three emergency shelters on the outskirts of what remains of the town. "You can’t wash your hands or face," says 72-year-old Katsu Sawayama, seated in the middle of the high school gymnasium, the biggest of the shelters in a town where more than half the 17,000 residents are still missing.

Adding to their woes, an unseasonal snowstorm sent temperatures plunging to below zero and blanketed acres of tsunami debris in white.

While international attention has been focused on Japan’s efforts to stop damage at a quake-hit nuclear power plant from spiraling out of control, a massive salvage and rescue operation has slowly been gathering steam.

Scores of villages, hamlets and towns lining Japan’s northeast coast were flattened by tsunami waves that rolled in minutes after Friday’s 9.0 magnitude earthquake.

While the official toll stands at less than 5,000, thousands more are listed as missing and the final tally is likely to soar.

About 850,000 households in the north were still without electricity in near-freezing weather, Tohuku Electric Power co. said, while the government said at least 1.5 million households lacked running water.

Like tens of thousands of people along Japan’s northeast coast, the Otsuchi survivors have nowhere else to go. Meals are barely enough to sustain them — half a rice ball and a small bowl of miso soup is a luxury; a slice of bread might have to feed a family of three.

"whatever they give us, we just gratefully receive. At least they’re feeding us three times a day," said Sayawama.

International experts say that panic over fears of radiation leaks from the Daiichi nuclear plant could detract from problems likely to affect survivors of the quake and tsunami, such as the cold, access to clean water and getting enough food.

"People are getting so concerned about what are at the moment pretty low levels of radiation," said Dr. Richard Wakeford of Britain’s University of Manchester, "but the real problems … are in dealing with the earthquake and the tsunami."

"if this was a developing country, we’d have people going down in their hundreds and thousands with the likes of typhoid and cholera by now. the questions should be: Where is the sewage going? What is the state of the drinking water? if I were a public health official, that would be my principal concern."

Ayumi Yamazaki, 21, is already concerned and worries her 1-1/2-year-old daughter is not getting enough to eat.

"we rarely get to eat rice, so I’m a little concerned," she said, "but it’s better than not eating at all."

Math teacher, Naoshi Moriya, volunteering at the evacuation site’s make-shift logistics office, says he’s worried that it is only a matter of time before food runs out.

Despite the privations there’s a sense of order in the evacuation center. in late afternoon, a neat queue forms in one hallway of the refuge shelter for men under 60 years old to collect clean undergarments sent in through charity. "Long-sleeve undergarments are reserved for the elderly," a volunteer who lost her home says, apologizing to one man.

Outside help is slowly and sparingly arriving. a Self-Defense Forces truck carrying a fresh supply of water arrived late afternoon on Wednesday, and two Red Cross teams arrived for the first time to treat patients.

"It’s cold today so many people have fallen ill, getting diarrhea and other symptoms," said Takanori Watanabe, a Red Cross doctor from Himeji, western Japan. he says 80 people queued up when they arrived.

Elsewhere there were signs of human touches.

AttachmentSize Delivering food (Reuters) – an elderly couple walks to deliver food to their relatives who are victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Minamisanriku City in Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan.43.48 KB

ANNUS HORRIBILIS was the term Queen Elizabeth II used to describe 1992 as a bad year. the Latin-speaking Rizal also heard about a bad year too in 1882 when the country was hit by a cholera epidemic, an earthquake, a typhoon, floods and an epidemic of beri-beri. Agriculture was affected, with land left untilled, and harvest in storage depleted or destroyed. Little wonder Rizal?s letters from Madrid complain of the inadequate and irregular allowance from home.

Hidden in this history of calamity is one detail: a comet ripped the sky. So fantastic was this comet seen in Calamba that Rizal?s father asked if it was also visible in Spain. Rizal replied that he saw it, too. This brilliant comet might have been a sight to behold, but in the Philippines it was a bad omen.

Rizal?s correspondence with his family in the last quarter of 1882 is quite surreal. Letters from Barcelona and Madrid describe sights and experiences of the wide-eyed indio in the mother country, while letters from home list those afflicted with or dead from cholera. It is odd that the gory details are left out, perhaps because Rizal knew that cholera is spread through contaminated water and that the classical symptoms are vomiting and/or frequent diarrhea of a consistency described as ?rice water.? Victims grow weak from dehydration, their eyes become deep and their fingertips wrinkled. Many would die.

How did they cope? all schools were closed, students sent home, except third year medical students who were made to serve in the University of Santo Tomas, San Lazaro and other places converted into quarantine for those afflicted or suspected to have cholera. Rizal?s brother-in-law Silvestre Ubaldo, writing from Bulacan in October 1882, said, ?Here in the provinces manzanilla flower was exhausted, there is a shortage of cognac in the groceries, and its price doubled as none can be obtained. we drink manzanilla and tea as our drinking water, and smudge and clean the house constantly.?

Antonino Lopez, another brother-in-law, wrote in August 1882: ?Here in Calamba, as well as in every barrio, there is a procession every night praying God to spare the town of the plague. all foodstuffs that may cause illness, like those with a bad smell, such as small dried fish, pickled fish, and the like, are forbidden. Therefore the town of Calamba is very clean.?

Manuel Hidalgo, another brother-in-law, wrote: ?Cholera attacked our houseboys, Flaviano and Evaristo, but thanks to local remedies (sambong, pepita, garlic, etc.) they were saved. Alfonso, Narcisa?s servant, died. An average of 16 die daily.?

It was a terrible time compared to ours. during the bird flu scare information was transmitted faster, importation of fowl regulated, and thermo-scanners at airports identified suspected carriers. we saw no need for nationwide prayer as they had in 1882.

Paciano Rizal left us with a sense of their times:

?As to the social life in our town, many people go to church in the morning to attend daily prayers as prescribed by the archbishop?s pastoral letter. there is a continuous movement of men carrying bottles to get medicine. the priests are always riding in vehicles to bring spiritual aid to where they are called. in the afternoon there are bonfires in many places to serve as disinfectant and the people go to church again to recite the novena to San Roque. At night processions, sometimes three, cross one another in the streets until the late hours. At their conclusion, the participants eat at the house of the leader, who prepares food and fireworks as much as his resources permit.

?What I admire in these things is the contrast between the sentiments of old and young. the old grieve when they ought to rejoice because the plague makes them see their end closer. the young rejoice when they ought to grieve because they are in danger of not being able to fulfill the object for which they have come to this world.

?Now that the plague is at its peak, an average of 15 persons die daily. from night to morning, healthy and robust men become corpses or at least, so completely unrecognizable and emaciated, hovering between life and death. Those who succumb to any other diseases deserve to be envied, because at least, they are attended to and taken care of at their homes, they are taken to church and are buried in the cemetery, but the victims of this scourge cannot comfort themselves that they are treated thus. Their relatives, even the close ones, flee; they are not taken care of and if sometimes they are attended to, they become a heavy burden to their companions in the house who fear contagion. They are wrapped up and buried with the Chinese.

?It is a sad thing to die under these circumstances and of this disease. Dogs devour the exposed. I doubt very much if the grave has a depth of two spans, and there is a throng of dogs around. If we were of Brahmin caste, transmigration would be most natural for us, but since we are Catholics, we wish our ashes to be respected.?

A typhoon in October 1882, followed by another in November, destroyed homes along Laguna de Bay and dissolved sugar in warehouses yet people rejoiced, believing these typhoons chased cholera away. But just when they thought everything was okay, a new disease arrived that caused swelling in the legs and death: beri-beri. the year 1882 was annus horribilis, indeed.

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UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 17 (UPI) — the United Nations announced Friday the creation of an independent panel of scientific experts to explore the source of the cholera epidemic in Haiti.

“We are calling for an international panel and we are in discussions with WHO (the U.N. World Health Organization) to find the best experts to be in a panel, completely independent… (and) have the best investigation on the source of the outbreak,” the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Alain Le Roy, said at a U.N. press conference.

There has been speculation that U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal serving in Haiti may have been the source of the epidemic.

“There is no consensus among scientists on this issue,” Le Roy said.

None of the Nepalese peacekeepers had either tested positive for, or shown any symptoms of, cholera and repeated testing of water from their camp has not turned up any detectable strain of the disease, the U.N. says.

“We want to make the best effort to get to the bottom of this and find answers that the people of Haiti deserve,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said.

Haiti was in an ongoing recovery operation from a January earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people when cholera broke out in October.