Forty-one children have died of severe cold this month at camps for Afghan refugees on the border with Pakistan, an aid worker said on Sunday. Haji Abdul Ghani, of the Pakistan-based Edhi Welfare Trust, told Reuters squalid living conditions in four temporary camps in and around the southern Afghan town of Spin Boldak had combined with freezing temperatures to threaten another 1,200 children, most below the age of eight. Ghani said pneumonia, tuberculosis and malaria were the most prevalent diseases. He said he feared the number of children falling sick and dying could increase rapidly. Almost 100,000 people live in camps at Spin Boldak without adequate clothing or shelter to keep out the cold in an area where temperatures often plunge to minus 15C (5F), Ghani said. Another 35,000 are crammed into similar camps on the Pakistan side of the border, which has been sealed by Pakistani troops pursuing Taliban and al Qaeda remnants from Afghanistan. Farid Ahmed Karimi, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said it had confirmed 13 deaths in camps on both sides of the border. He said pneumonia had been the biggest killer and UNHCR would distribute warm clothes and footwear to the displaced families crammed into makeshift shelters and tents on Sunday. Afghanistan has an estimated 700,000 internally displaced people. About 400,000 are scattered around southern areas of the country, most having been forced from their homes as a result of a long-running drought. UNHCR called for urgent international rehabilitation and reconstruction assistance to drought-affected regions of Afghanistan. Several thousand Afghans have died in the past four years of drought, the worst to hit the country in about four decades. Nearly two hundred of the deaths were caused by extreme cold in one night two years ago at a camp for displaced people in the western city of Herat. (Reuters)