4 Million at Risk in Bangladesh, Red Cross Fears : Cyclone: Disease and lack of food endanger survivors. Without massive aid, a report warns, more could die. Nations have pledged $48 million so far.

A week after a savage cyclone and tidal surge killed more than 125,000 people, an additional 4 million people are “now at serious risk” because of lack of food, contaminated drinking water and disease, the Red Cross said Monday.

A report by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies also warned that “many more deaths could follow” unless a massive aid program is quickly organized.

“Enormous health hazards are posed by the great numbers of unburied corpses and carcasses of animals,” the report said.

Although the world’s nations have pledged $48 million in emergency assistance, according to state-run Bangladeshi television, the government’s relief effort so far has been haphazard at best and hampered by scant resources, poor communications and daily thunderstorms. Little or no aid has reached most of the devastated coastal villages and islands.

On Sandwip Island, where the Red Cross estimates that 35,000 people were killed, a schoolteacher said Monday that most of the bodies buried in the last two days were those of infants and children who died of diarrhea, dysentery and dehydration.

“When there is no drinking water, there is little anybody can do,” said Dr. Mohammed Musa, a nutritionist. After four days, he said, “hunger turns to starvation” and “people start dying from the effect of weakened bodies.

“We have already reached the critical period,” he said.

In low-lying coastal villages near Cox’s Bazar, streams are now “black from decomposing corpses,” said a Swiss relief worker who toured the area. “It’s a miracle anyone is alive there.”

On still-flooded Katubdia Island, the first relief helicopter to land sparked near-riots as hundreds of men and women rushed for boxes of high-protein biscuits.

Women sobbed and screamed, and the mob nearly crushed a small girl as soldiers lost control of the boxes. A young boy picked crumbs from the mud and stuffed them eagerly in his mouth.

“Help us, please,” one woman pleaded. “Please help us.”

The fierce cyclone and 12- to 20-foot tidal surge, the most severe in decades, also has left the impoverished country’s economy reeling after several years of nominal progress. Nearly 90% of the country’s development budget already comes from foreign aid.

“We cannot assess the economic loss,” said Khandaker Hossain, a Cabinet minister surveying the battered city of Chittagong on Monday. “But the damage is beyond anyone’s imagination.”

Here in Chittagong, the nation’s major port and commercial center, the storm sank at least eight ships in the harbor, wrecked dozens more and smashed jetties and huge dockside cranes. Much of the once-bustling port is now blocked or unusable.

Even worse, the only two barges with heavy cranes designed to help clear the port are out of commission. One of them tore loose from its moorings and now sits astride a road near the airport, high and dry beside a line of waving coconut palms. The second barge ripped its eight anchors loose, tore five miles down the Karnaphuli River and smashed through the center span of a newly opened, mile-long bridge. Then it, and most of the span, sank.

The government estimates that the storm caused at least $1.4 billion worth of damage.

Bernard Couchner, the French minister for human resources and development, appeared to question the death toll figures at a press conference in Dhaka.

“In disasters, it is usual for the numbers to decrease after months or years,” he said. “I hope deeply that will happen here.”

Whatever the figure might be, for a country that is best known for abject poverty--85% of the people are subsistence farmers, half the babies are born malnourished, the average annual income is $170--the damage from the worst natural disaster in decades is incalculable.

The storm ravaged shrimp farms and salt production operations, destroyed flood embankments and dams and flooded warehouses full of everything from tea to fertilizer. Schools, hospitals, roads, power and telephone lines were either destroyed or badly damaged.

In Chittagong’s new export processing zone, workers hauled water-soaked bales of cloth, racks of sneakers, newsprint and other goods out to dry or to discard Monday. The storm had toppled eight-foot-high brick walls, then flooded the seaside complex.

To make matters worse, the cyclone hit as Bangladesh struggled to recover from the effects of the Persian Gulf War.

The country’s import bill for petroleum products rose by $500 million last fall. The crisis also forced most of about 100,000 Bangladeshi workers in Kuwait and Iraq to return home. Remittances from overseas workers fell by $150 million. Add in the cost of repatriation, falling export earnings, lost aid from Kuwait and other expenses, and the government estimates that the Gulf crisis cost the nation nearly $1.5 billion.

A Red Cross official, Denis McClean, said Bangladesh is thus especially hampered as it tries to mount one of the largest relief efforts in its history.