New Threat to Baghdad: Diseases : Iraq: Deadly epidemics of cholera, typhoid and meningitis may sweep through the city soon, a U.N. official warns.

The trees in Baghdad’s parks are all stripped bare, dismembered for fuel by the city’s millions of freezing and hungry.

The meandering Tigris River, long since poisoned by pollution, has become both well and latrine for the Baghdadis, now living without power, sewage systems or clean drinking water for nearly two months.

The children of the Iraqi capital are shellshocked and undernourished, traumatized by weeks of nightly sirens and air strikes and weakened by a diet of bread, tomatoes, onions and--perhaps--an occasional egg.

And in a matter of weeks, with the onset of oppressive springtime heat, deadly epidemics of cholera, typhoid and meningitis will start sweeping through the city.

That is the picture that Richard Reid, regional director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, painted of war’s aftermath in a battered and bombed-out Baghdad, where peace may well be far more deadly than the actual war.

Reid, who had just returned from Iraq, told a press conference here Wednesday that the country is “right on the edge of what could be a complete catastrophe--especially on the epidemic side.”

With no outside assistance, he said, “the postwar death rate in Iraq certainly could be much, much higher than the combined civilian and military death toll during the war itself.”

Already, he said, child mortality in the Iraqi capital is up significantly. The health care system has collapsed. And, despite Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s order increasing the weekly rations of vital food staples, the city of nearly 4 million has been left with few roads to recovery.

By all accounts, the 43 consecutive nights of allied air strikes pushed the Iraqi capital back toward the 19th Century. Although the attacks were largely surgical--hundreds of cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs that only occasionally hit residential areas--the allies’ strategic targets included power stations, refineries, fuel depots, water plants, chemical factories, government ministry buildings, communications centers and bridges and roads, destroying much of the economic infrastructure of the city and the nation.

As a result, the highly organized and efficient systems created by Hussein have completely broken down on every level.

“Just in the past few days, the government is starting to take hold again,” Reid said, “but the situation is still burningly urgent now.”

In a 16-page report sent to the U.N. committee overseeing sanctions against Iraq for its Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, Reid and the six other members of a medical team that recently toured parts of the country for five days concluded: “If nothing is done to remedy water supply and improve sanitation, a catastrophe could beset (all of) Iraq.”

The life-threatening devastation is not confined to the Iraqi capital. Reid, an American, told reporters Wednesday that his international medical team could not reach Basra during its brief visit, but he described the country’s second-largest city, which was the command and supply center for Iraqi forces when they occupied Kuwait and is now the focal point of a civil and military revolt throughout southern Iraq, as “the worst hit” of any Iraqi city or town.

Springtime temperatures rise faster and higher in Basra, he said, and the postwar strife that has left the city in a shambles will combine to make conditions more deadly for the hundreds of thousands of residents.

“Anything that brings more disorder to a country that has been made as chaotic as Iraq already was when the war ended cannot be good for civilians, and especially not for children,” he said of the civil strife.

Still, nearly a quarter of Iraq’s 17 million people live in Baghdad, a sprawling capital city that Reid likened to Los Angeles, and it was there that Reid’s team made the most detailed analysis of Iraq’s needs for immediate survival.

“There is no doubt that the city itself is facing the outbreak of terrible epidemics,” he said, citing cholera, typhoid, meningitis, gastroenteritis and other potentially fatal water-borne diseases.

Reid said UNICEF and the U.N.’s World Health Organization, which supplied half of the fact-finding team, have submitted requests to the U.N. Security Council to approve a short shopping list of items that they concluded could help Iraq stave off epidemics by restoring limited water supply, sewage treatment and power systems.

At least two of the items, Reid conceded, are controversial. At the top of the list is fuel, a commodity with obvious military uses.

“All seven of Baghdad’s water-treatment plants and all 252 sewage-treatment facilities are out of operation, largely because of a lack of energy,” he said. “All of them require electricity and, with the exception of some emergency generators, all major power systems are out.”

Without fuel and spare parts to repair Baghdad’s power plants, the city can only limp along on a few hours of power a day, and none of the critical utilities can function even at minimal levels.

Even with ample fuel supplies, though, the city urgently needs chemicals for its water-purification plants. Reid specifically mentioned aluminum sulfate and chlorine, which he also conceded have military uses, as well.

But Reid, a veteran Middle East aid official who traveled many times to Iraq before it invaded Kuwait last August, expressed optimism that the Security Council’s sanctions committee will approve his team’s requests, which were sent through U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, who had authorized the group’s mission.

(Southland Edition, A10) HEALTH FEARS

U.N. and health officials are concerned about a number of problems facing war-ravaged Iraq, among them:

* Many Iraqis are drinking untreated river water or using rivers as latrines because of the disruption in sewage and water lines.

* The use of untreated water has prompted concerns of possible epidemics of cholera, dysentery, typhoid and meningitis.

* Hospitals lack water, surgical instruments and electricity.

* Food is scarce, raising fears of malnutrition.

* Children are among the most vulnerable to disease and malnutrition; in Baghdad, children under the age of 15 make up about 45% of the population.

* The return of 100-degree-plus temperatures could exacerabate the spread of diseases.