World | Updated May 15, 2008 at 07:01pm IST

Myanmar: India to send doctors to help survivors

New Delhi India will send a team of 50 medical personnel including doctors to Yangon, Myanmar on Saturday.

They are going at the specific request of the Myanmar authorities. They will be the first foreign medical team to enter Myanmar since the cyclone.

MoD sources said the request came on Wednesday and it is up to the Myanmarese to decide where exactly the medics will be deployed.

It's not clear how long their mission will last. The move comes amid warnings of another cyclone that could hit the Irrawaddy delta.

The UN says the confirmed death toll is a little over 38,000 with nearly 30,000 missing. The Red Cross estimates the figure of those dead could cross 1,20,000.

Meanwhile, the UN on Wednesday said that another cyclone is forming near Myanmar less than two weeks after it was devastated by a killer storm.

Amanda Pitt, the spokeswoman of the United Nations humanitarian relief programme, couldn't say where the landfall would be or when it would become a full-fledged cyclone.

She told reporters today that another cyclone was likely, saying, "This is terrible."

She said the information about the possible cyclone came from the Joint Typhoon Warning centre, which is part of the UN's World Meteorological Centre.

The May 2-3 cyclone that pulverised Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta left more than 60,000 people dead or missing.

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