Related: Only $90 mln pledged for Pakistan's quake relief

    BEIJING, Oct. 27 -- The United Nations on Wednesday called for $550 million in emergency aid for Pakistani quake victims on the eve of the donors' conference in Geneva, as aid workers warned that thousands of survivors faced death from exposure and disease. 

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will try to raise urgently needed aid for Pakistani quake victims at a meeting with governments in Geneva.(AFP file photo)

    "We meet today to prevent a second shock wave of deaths, and to prevent further suffering," Secretary General Kofi Annan told a donors' conference in Geneva. "In the next few days, weeks, we literally remain in a life-saving phase."

    The UN has raised its appeal to about $550m from its original target of $312m. "The scale of this tragedy almost defies our darkest imagination," Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, told a donors conference yesterday.

    Donors have been slow to respond to initial fund-raising appeals, with the U.N. only receiving a third of the $312 million it requested.

    The charity Oxfam named France, Austria and Spain among seven of the world's richest countries which had not contributed a single penny to the UN's emergency appeal for the earthquake.

    Britain, which has so far given $17.4m, has given the most money of the world's leading economies to the UN's Pakistan appeal.

    The US, which has given $10.8m, is second. Japan has given $8m, Germany $3.9m, and Italy $1.2m.

Workers from relief organisations prepare supplies for earthquake victims at a relief centre in Islamabad October 26, 2005.(Reuters photo)

    But Oxfam accused the US, Japan, Germany and Italy of not giving their "fair share" to the appeal in proportion to the size of their economies.

    The Oct. 8 quake killed more than 53,000 people, injured 74,000 and left an estimated 3 million homeless. Tens of thousands of people remain stranded in inaccessible mountain villages, where aid has not yet arrived, and the death toll could double if help is not "immediately mobilized" for them, said the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

    Many injured had undergone limb amputations due to delayed evacuations, while hundreds of thousands more faced hunger and exposure, said UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland.

    "If we had had this fund, we would have been able to do more earlier," Egeland told officials from around 60 countries at the emergency donors' conference to boost rescue efforts. Enditem

(Agencies)