No cure for the victims of Kabul's rabid dogs

Hundreds of rabid dogs are roaming the ruined streets of Kabul, a Taliban official said yesterday, but there is no vaccine for the three or four bite victims who seek hospital aid every day. Most are children who try to play with the animals, the health minister, Mullah Abbas Akhund, said.

When the city prepares for the nightly raids by US jets searching out military targets, the only sounds in the dark-ened capital are the howling and barking of street dogs.

People in the devoutly Muslim country rarely keep dogs as pets because their religion frowns on them as dirty.

"Children are dying in our hospitals because we have no vaccines," Mullah Akhund said. "Yesterday we had several cases of rabies. We had nowhere to send them. If we don't get vaccines they will be dead in three or four days."

The lack of vaccines is just an entry in a long list of complaints by the Taliban's health minister; no medicines, no cold storage facilities, no transportation, no laboratories. He had called the news conference to condemn the US-British campaign, now in its fourth week. Najibullah Masoomyar, chief of the health ministry's sanitation department, said: "If this goes on for another month, the children will have mental problems. At night I hug my son and my wife to my chest, because they are crying."

He was at the news conference to complain about the lack of clean drinking water, which he blamed on the nightly air raids. He said the sanitation department has been unable to work because it is in Kabul's northern Khair Khana neighbourhood, where the sewage is treated and dumped. "But the trucks can't go out there because of the bombardment," he said. "The drivers are afraid" There have been several assaults on the northern neighbourhood, by jets searching out Taliban military positions as well as its front-line concentrations facing the Northern Alliance.

At the news conference in Mullah Akhund's spacious office, its windows crisscrossed with tape to reduce the effect of shattering in an attack, Dr Mohammed Waziri said some victims of the bombing had strange symptoms he blamed on chemical weapons that he claimed were being used by Allied forces. The Pentagon says such weapons are not being used in Afghanistan.

Dr Waziri said three patients came to the hospital with only minor injuries but developed respiratory problems. Their lungs could not take in oxygen, they began to spit blood and later died. "For sure we don't know what it was," he said. "We do not have the facilities to conduct tests."

Mullah Akhund laughed at the suggestion that samples be sent to a neighbouring country. "Our borders are sealed," he said. "There is no one who will help us. Who should we send a sample to? Pakistan? They have joined against us. They are not our friends."

He also scoffed at suggestions that the United Nations or independent international observers be invited to Afghan-istan to perform forensic tests. "The United Nations is not neutral," Mullah Akhund said, fingering his prayer beads and gesturing as he spoke from the head of a long table. "It is always talking about a government that will replace the Taliban government. How can we trust what they say?"

He said the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, made up of more than 50 Muslim nations, had declined an invitation to Afghanistan. "It is a big betrayal," he said. (AP)