A top U.N. official called for more urgency in the world's response to the Kashmir earthquake, saying millions were suffering from a disaster that hit more people over a wider area than the Asian tsunami. "We need to have a sense of urgency here like we had in the tsunami," the U.N.'s chief emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland told Reuters in an interview after touring the disaster area in Pakistani Kashmir and Northwest Frontier Province. The official death toll from Saturday's quake is 25,000 but is expected to rise. Some local officials in Pakistan say it could exceed 40,000. Another 1,200 died in Indian Kashmir. While many more people lost their lives in last December's tsunami, Egeland said more had been affected over a wider area in the 7.6 magnitude quake, the worst in the region in 100 years. Egeland said the majority of the 4.5 million people in Kashmir region had been directly affected. "Everybody lost somebody they knew, most people lost their livelihood, perhaps half of the people either lost their homes or had damaged housing. "More than one million people we see as very severely affected -- they are homeless, they have nothing, they don't have safe water sources, for example, and it's those people we have to concentrate on in our emergency relief effort," he said. Egeland said hundreds of millions of dollars were needed for "just saving lives and keeping people alive" with the bitter winter approaching in mountainous Kashmir. He said there had been an outpouring of support and an enormous wave of sympathy from around the world, but added: "I would like to see it being even more quick this response."
