Haiti victims wait for food and aid - Press Association

Troops, doctors and aid workers are now flowing into Haiti but hundreds of thousands of quake victims are still struggling to find water or food.

Help is not reaching many victims of Tuesday's quake, choked back by transport bottlenecks, bureaucratic confusion, fear of attacks on aid convoys, the collapse of local authority and the sheer scale of the need.

"We don't need military aid. What we need is food and shelter," one man yelled at UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during his visit to Port-au-Prince. "We are dying," a woman told him.

Haitian riot police meanwhile fired tear gas to disperse crowds of looters in the city centre as nearby shops burned.

Looting spread as hundreds of young men and boys clambered up broken walls to break into shops and take whatever they could find. Especially prized was toothpaste, which people smear under their noses to fend off the stench of decaying bodies.

The US ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten, acknowledged that "the security situation is obviously not perfect," but said new troops scheduled to arrive during the day were meant to back up Haitian police and UN personnel, not replace them.

The Pan American Health Organisation estimates 50,000 to 100,000 died in Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude quake and Haitian officials believe the number is higher. Many survivors have lost their homes and many live outside for fear unstable buildings could collapse in aftershocks.

So many people have lost homes that the World Food Programme is planning a tent camp for 100,000 people on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

Five days after the quake struck more survivors were freed from under piles of concrete and debris. Teams with search dogs rescued a 16-year-old Dominican girl trapped for five days in a three-storey hotel that crumbled in central Port-au-Prince.

At the UN headquarters destroyed in the quake, rescuers lifted a Danish staff member alive from the ruins, just 15 minutes after Secretary-General Ban visited the site where UN mission chief Hedi Annabi and at least 39 other staff members were killed.