An international aid group said yesterday it had reports that up to 150 children had died of cold-related illnesses in one part of a snowbound Afghan province, and hundreds more may have died. Catholic Relief Services said a team of six doctors who had surveyed villages along a 60 km (40 mile) stretch of highway in the remote central province of Ghor were told of 140-150 child deaths.

Most of the deaths appeared to have been caused by pneumonia and most were of children under the age of five, Paul Hicks, director of CRS for western Afghanistan, told Reuters. ?These are still unconfirmed numbers, based on reports the teams are getting from talking to families and community leaders?, he said. Hicks said the doctors reported 100 percent rates of anaemia and very high rates of severe malnutrition among children ? with the rate for under fives ranging from 10-20 percent.

Hicks said aid workers feared the death toll in remote regions of the province, which relief workers had been unable to reach because of heavy snow, could be far higher. ?Several hundred children may have died,» he said. Hicks expressed frustration that aid teams had been unable to reach remote parts of the province to assess emergency relief needs because of a lack of helicopters from either the US military or the United Nations. «We have not been able to get air support, and for the past three weeks we have not been able to get people into these areas?, he said.

?It is a matter of resources and priorities. The US military has not been able to provide resources and the UN has only one helicopter available, which cannot possibly meet the needs.? The US military does plan to fly a C-130 transport plane mission over Ghor on Friday to drop 16 pallets of food supplied by the UN World Food Programme. But Hicks said there was a need to get survey teams on the ground to assess what emergency supplies, such as food, fuel and medicines, were needed throughout the province.

?There is an especial need for fuel,? he said. There has been especially high snowfall and there are a lot of familes who didn?t prepare enough fuel stocks to get them through the winter. According to some reports we are hearing, some familes are having to pull wood from the roofs of the houses to burn.? The Ghor provincial government said last week it had confirmed 136 deaths, mostly of children, in four districts but the real toll may be more than 300.

The Ministry of Heath has dismissed concerns expressed by CRS last week that more than 1,000 children may have died in Ghor in what has been one of its worst winters for years. Health Minister Sayed Mohammad Amin Fatemi has played down the figures, saying on Wednesday that the number of confirmed child deaths caused by cold weather throughout the country in the past six weeks was 211. Hicks said ministry statistics came only from areas which had health clinics. Since few villagers could access these, most deaths went unrecorded, he said.

<B>David BRUNNSTROM</B>