“Tsunami lung” appears to start with a bacterial lung infection caused by breathing in mud and polluted water, and spreads to the brain, causing abscesses followed by paralysis. It can be treated with strong antibiotics.

The illness was disclosed in last week’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine in a vivid description of how a 17-year-old Indonesian girl was saved by a team of American doctors on board a US Navy hospital ship anchored off the island of Sumatra.

Dr Ann Kao, a paediatrician, said the girl was paralysed and had difficulty breathing when she was brought aboard from the Zainoel Abidin hospital in the ruined city of Banda Aceh, seven weeks after the tsunami.

“Her speech was not intelligible,” she said, recalling “how withdrawn and profoundly sad she appeared”.

The girl had lost her mother and sister in giant waves that swept her almost a mile from their home, which stood one-and-a-half miles inland. A few days later she found her father but had developed a cough.

As the weeks passed the girl became sicker. Soon it looked as if she was destined for one of the mass graves that pockmark the coastline of north Sumatra’s Aceh province.

But she was one of the fortunate few. Staff of the International Committee of the Red Cross noticed her condition and contacted the USS Mercy, where volunteers from Massachusetts general hospital had joined navy doctors.

The case notes show that she would have died without the skill and technology in the ship’s operating rooms. At one point a surgeon, a neurologist, a lung specialist and a tropical diseases consultant all clustered around her bed.

With the aid of computerised scans, Lieutenant Commander Stephen Ferrara discovered that “an aggressive cavity-forming organism” had infected her lungs and spread to the brain, where it was causing abscesses.

The doctors decided she had “tsunami-related aspiration pneumonia” and gave her huge doses of vaccines and antibiotics. Aspiration means the intake of a substance into the lungs.

“People who survived the wave frequently aspirated not only water but soil and particulate matter,” said Dr Edward Ryan.

Doctors across the region are now discovering hundreds of similar cases six months after the waves left more than 200,000 people dead or missing in 11 nations. Staff at the Rajavithi hospital in Bangkok have treated dozens of patients with late-developing problems.

There were no such facilities in Banda Aceh. Gareth Thomas, Britain’s development minister, who has just toured the stricken region, says the suffering of Aceh province hit him particularly hard.

He saw one village whose population had been reduced from 1,500 to 247 in the catastrophe. Only three children and 28 women survived. Thomas’s guide returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca to find all five of his sons dead.

“It is amazing what people can come through,” said Thomas. “This man was just focusing on his work to help him get through each day.”

The British government will propose at the United Nations that a $1 billion (£550m) emergency fund be set up for tsunami-type disasters. It will also push for a register of aid experts who can be flown at short notice into disaster zones, plus a list of available equipment such as cargo aircraft and helicopters.

In Aceh, the tsunami propelled rebels into fresh negotiations with the Indonesian government that may put an end to decades of conflict. In Sri Lanka, meanwhile, the government and Tamil Tiger rebels have agreed to share control of £1.6 billion in disaster aid.

There are still shortfalls, however — it is estimated that 35% of the £2.94 billion promised by the world’s 10 biggest donors has not yet been earmarked for spending — and a new Oxfam survey has found that much relief money tends to go to businesses and landowners, exacerbating the divide between rich and poor.

For the sick Indonesian girl onboard the Mercy, the aid has proved a lifesaver. She responded well to treatment and eventually came out of her shell enough to chatter to the ship’s crew. “On the day of her discharge she moved her right leg and arm for the first time and burst into laughter,” said Kao. She is now able to stand and walk.

Additional reporting: Tom Walker

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