By Eric Green
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- The United Nations is appealing to the international community to help hundreds of thousands of people, especially children, who face starvation and disease in Peru as a result of severe cold weather in the Andean nation.

More than 60 children have died from acute respiratory infections as a result of freezing temperatures, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in a July 25 statement. Access to the affected areas in isolated mountain regions continued to be difficult due to precarious road conditions and high altitudes (4,000 meters above sea level).

News reports indicated that U.N. agencies, including UNICEF and the World Food Program, will provide $745,000 to aid Peruvian victims of the cold weather.

UNICEF said more than 80,000 families in Peru have been affected by the severe cold, which also has caused major losses of livestock. Thousands of llamas, sheep, and cows -- whose meat, milk, and wool sustain the indigenous communities in Peru's Andean highlands -- have frozen to death.

The U.N. agency said best available estimates indicate that the weather has killed more than 75,000 farm animals, destroyed more than 300,000 hectares of food crops, and damaged an additional 347,000 hectares of crops. UNICEF said most of the inhabitants of the affected areas are poor peasants "eking out" a living from llama and alpaca herds and subsistence farming.

Snowstorms in the area are said to have mostly tapered off, but freezing temperatures dropping to minus 22 degrees Celsius have persisted, causing many children and elderly people to contract pneumonia and bronchitis, according to Peruvian health officials. More than 400 cases of pneumonia have been reported.

UNICEF said the situation could worsen drastically in Peru, as the coldest winter temperatures usually occur in August or September.

The agency expressed concern that many children from the affected areas in Peru do not have warm clothes or enough food, and that many are unable to attend school. UNICEF said it is working with local communities to provide children with warm clothing and basic medicines, but that "further international assistance is urgently needed."

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which operates both regular assistance and emergency aid programs in Latin America and the Caribbean, says the most efficient and effective way to help those affected by a disaster is to make a monetary donation to a humanitarian organization that is implementing relief programs in the affected region.

USAID says there are a few different ways to go about identifying such organizations, including checking the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. That office maintains a web site called ReliefWeb, which is a repository of information about various natural disasters submitted by responding humanitarian organizations. ReliefWeb's Internet address is: http://www.reliefweb.int

InterAction, a Washington-based association of non-profit humanitarian organizations, may have a list of responding members on its Web site as well. The site's address is: http://www.interaction.org

Meanwhile, recent winter storms also caused at least eight weather-related deaths in Argentina and Chile, while southern Brazil was said to have suffered its coldest temperatures in a decade.

Nicaragua also was affected by bad weather. Recent heavy rains and mudslides killed at least 25 people and affected more than 18,000 more. The Nicaraguan government declared the department of Matagalpa and 54 communities in the Atlantic region disaster areas.