KABUL, Afghanistan - Hundreds of rabid dogs are roaming the streets of this war-wounded capital, a Taliban official said Monday, but there is no vaccine for the three or four people who report to hospitals with dog bites every day.
Most of them are children who try to play with the dogs, Health Minister Mullah Abbas Akhund said.
''Children are dying in our hospitals because we have no vaccines,'' Akhund said. ''Yesterday we had several cases of rabies that came to the hospital. We had nowhere to send them.''
People in this devoutly Muslim country rarely keep dogs as pets because their religion frowns on them as dirty. Night brings a cacophony of barking, howling dogs in a city where the 8:30 p.m. curfew and the fear of American air attack keep people off the streets.
Rabid dogs had been a problem in Kabul long before the start of the American bombing campaign, launched Oct. 7 to force the ruling Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in last month's terrorist attacks in the United States.
Before the crisis over those terrorist strikes, the Taliban had sufficient supplies of rabies vaccine, most of them donated by international relief organizations.
However, since aid agencies withdrew all their non-Afghan staff last month before the bombing campaign began, shipments of all humanitarian aid, including medical supplies, have been severely curtailed.
As a result, medical supplies of all kinds are running low, and Taliban officials say they ran out of rabies vaccine three days ago.
The lack of vaccine is just one in a long list of complaints by the Taliban's health minister - no medicines, no cold storage facilities, no transportation, no laboratories.
Akhund called the news conference to condemn the U.S.-British air campaign, now into its fourth week.
''If this goes on for another month, the children will have mental problems. At night I hug my son to my chest and my wife, because all night they are crying,'' said Najibullah Masoomyar, chief of the health ministry's sanitation department.
He was at the news conference to complain about the lack of clean drinking water - which he blamed on the nightly air raids. He said the sanitation department has been unable to work because it is located in Kabul's northern Khair Khana neighborhood where the sewage is treated and dumped.
''But the trucks can't go out there because of the bombardment. They are afraid,'' he said.
There have been several assaults on the northern neighborhood, by jets searching out Taliban military positions as well as its front-line positions with the northern alliance.
