Predictions of post-tsunami health catastrophes in Sri Lanka are unlikely to come to pass, the leader of an Australian medical aid team said Wednesday. Public health specialist Graeme Peel was speaking in Melbourne on his return from a mission to assess medical needs in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the Boxing Day disaster. "It's not the situation that there is a major imminent risk of widespread infectious disease," Dr Peel told Australia's AAP news agency. "There's a local risk in the eastern province of Ampara but it's more likely that individual camps would suffer 20 or 30 cases of diarrhoea or respiratory disease rather than thousands across a widespread front. The reason for that is both the weather and also the high quality of the Sri Lankan health structure."
