Aid organisations are alarmed at the potential for diseases in several spontaneous camps that have sprung up in the quake zone, and the World Health Organisation is testing to see whether cholera has already broken out.

While the Pakistani authorities are trying to persuade people to move to properly administered camps, people living in Jalalabad Park, having already lost their homes in the quake, demonstrated against being forced to move again.

“We just wanted to convey that we have become used to this place, and we don’t want to move from here,” said student Raja Abid, one of the camp dwellers involved in the protest.

Abid and others said about 200 people took part in a peaceful demonstration at a park in the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, where families have been living in squalid conditions since the October 8 quake.

“They baton-charged us indiscriminately. They didn’t discriminate between women, children and men,” he said.

Local officials said two policemen and at least several protesters were injured.

Almost 400 tents are pitched in Jalalabad Park - one of the few open spaces in the ruined city, now surrounded by destroyed provincial government buildings.

“The administration has given us two days to shift, but where should we go? We don’t have anywhere,” Sayed Ismail Shah, one of the camp dwellers, said.

Deputy Inspector General Tahir Mehmood Qureshi said the administration had tried for days to persuade the people to move to a camp in a neighbourhood less affected by the quake.

“Today, they protested. We tried to disperse them through persuasion, but they didn’t. We were forced to baton charge them,” Qureshi said.

The WHO this week reported 300 cases of acute watery diarrhoea in just one of the tent settlements in Muzaffarabad, and the organisation was awaiting test results to determine whether cholera – which can be deadly – had broken in Muzaffarabad.

Ron Redmond, spokesman of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said: “What is really urgent is to get a good sanitation system into these camps, as well as clean water.”

Hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless and, with many mountain roads blocked by landslides, aid has yet to reach many in remote areas.

While there have been no outbreaks of epidemics, health workers say acute respiratory infections, diarrhoea, dysentery and tetanus, are spreading, especially in cramped tent settlements that have sprung up across the region.

Aid agencies are focusing resources on remote high-altitude communities where relief has been spotty, but that is leaving others vulnerable as sickness spreads, UN aid co-ordinator Rashid Khalikov said in Muzaffarabad.

“We do not have enough resources to take care of those who are in the lowlands. Their vulnerability also increases dramatically,” he said.

The UN says it has received funds and solid commitments worth only 15% of the total $550mn it is seeking for emergency relief operations.

Long-term reconstruction is expected to cost about $5bn. Pakistan is organising a donors’ conference on November 19, which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is due to attend.

The government has meanwhile revised the death toll from the October 8 earthquake downwards from 86,000 to 73,276, with another 100,000 injured and some 4mn people rendered homeless.

“The official death count remains 73,276 and that is a figure authenticated through a certain mechanism,” Major General Farooq Ahmed Khan, the federal relief commissioner told reporters earlier.

“We know these figures are likely to go up because we don’t know how many bodies are still buried under the collapsed houses,” Khan said. – Reuters