Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster on a scale comparable with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The official death count after Cyclone Nargis stood at just under half that by 1300 GMT today, at around 22,500 people dead plus a further 41,000 missing.

But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken delta of the Irrawaddy river, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be double that.

"We are looking at 50,000 dead and millions homeless," Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children, told The Times.

 Source : Times Online UK

"I’d characterise it as unprecedented in the history of Myanmar and on an order of magnitude with the effect of the tsunami on individual countries. It might well be more dead than the tsunami caused in Sri Lanka."

The death toll in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004 was 31,000, second only to the 131,000 who died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Eleven countries were affected.

Four days after the Burma cyclone there is wretchedly little hard information about the victims. Seven townships have been designated as "priority one" disaster areas, because between 90 to 95 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed.

"Anything less than 60 per cent destroyed is not being counted as a priority at this stage by the government, which gives some indication of the scale of the problem," said Mr Kirkwood.

According to the Burmese Government’s figures at least 10,000 people have died in the town of Bogalay alone.

Foreign aid agencies have reported scenes of devastation, with corpses still littering the rice fields and desperate survivors without food or clean drinking water. They are either without shelter or crammed into whatever buildings remain standing.

Burma's junta refused foreign aid after the 2004 tsunami, in which between 60 and 600 of its citizens are reported to have died, but this time the sheer scale of the slowly emerging disaster seems to have forced it to change its mind. "We will welcome help . . . from other countries because our people are in difficulty," said Nyah Win, the Burmese Foreign Minister, in a rare television appearance.

Cyclone Nargis ripped across Burma's agricultural heartland with violent winds that reached speeds of 120mph (193km/h), destroying buildings and fields, toppling trees and washing away roads in the vital rice-growing area of the Irrawaddy delta.

It flattened shanty towns and downed power and phone lines in the sprawling port city of Rangoon, Burma's former capital and home to five million people.

The price of staple foods such as rice, eggs, cabbages have doubled and even quadrupled in some areas.

Bernard Delpuech, a European Union aid official in Rangoon, said that the junta has sent three ships carrying food to the delta region, which is the rice production centre for Burma’s 53 million people. Nearly half the population live in the five disaster-hit states.

UN agencies have handed out what supplies they had from stockpiles in Burma, and are preparing to fly in further emergency food, shelter and medicines to prevent epidemics and starvation inflicting a second disaster.

Today private frustration was growing among aid organisations, however, that although the junta has publicly invited assistance, bureaucracy is impeding the granting of visas to allow foreign workers into the country. As delays drag on, living conditions for the victims is getting worse.

"The power is off, most people don't have water. They are relying on wells, and getting it out of the Inle Lake which is not clean. There is a risk of disease - if people are living together in close proximity then an outbreak of diarrhoea is just a matter of time," said Mr Kirkwood.

The generals – who have traditionally regarded overseas aid workers as spies – have turned down an offer from the US State Department of $250,000 (£125,000) in help and a disaster assistance team, suggesting that it remains selective about whom it accepts. The move prompted a rebuke from President Bush.

"The military junta must allow our disaster assessment teams into the country," Mr Bush told reporters, adding he was prepared to make US naval assets available for search and rescue.

The generals lifted the state of emergency today in three of the five worst-affected states, and also in parts of Rangoon and Irrawaddy, and announced that there was no immediate food crisis in Burma.

"I think there was some damage to rice stored by private merchants and growers, but we have enough surplus for domestic sufficiency," said Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan, the Burmese Information Minister, at a press conference in Rangoon.

The United Nations World Food Programme fears that the cyclone and flooding in two major rice growing areas could also affect food supply in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

The generals confirmed that a controversial referendum on Burma's new constitution, part of its "roadmap to democracy", will go ahead on May 10, although they conceded that it would have to be delayed by two weeks in Rangoon and Irrawaddy states until May 24.

The ruling provoked an outcry from opposition politicians, who say that all the country's efforts should be focused on getting aid to the suffering, rather than delivering ballot boxes and conducting an election.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned Burmese opposition leader, has urged followers to boycott the referendum, saying that the draft constitution leaves power still in the hands of the military.

The junta has moved even further into the shadows in the last six months due to widespread outrage at its bloody crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in September.

The US and EU states have imposed economic sanctions. In the past, humanitarian aid programmes have also been limited because of fears that they would benefit the generals.

Mr Bush today signed a law giving Aung San Suu Kyi the Congressional Medal of Honour, the highest civilian honour that the US Congress can bestow, calling her a “powerful voice” for freedom.

Factfile: storm deaths

1,500 dead in the southern United States in Hurricane Katrina in August 2005

4,400 dead in Bangladesh in Cyclone Sidr last November, the most recent violent storm to hit South-east Asia

9,000 dead in Central America in Hurricane Mitch in November 1998. Winds of up to 180mph, but most deaths caused by flooding and mudslides so extensive that the maps of Honduras and Nicaragua had to be redrawn

10,000 dead in east Indian state of Orissa in cyclone in October 1999. The winds were accompanied by a 26ft storm surge. Many died of starvation and disease as rescuers failed to reach them in time with aid

50,000 feared dead in Cyclone Nargis in Burma in May 2008

138,000 dead in Chittagong region of Bangladesh in cyclone in April 1991. The 20ft storm surge brought massive flooding that left 10 million homeless

225,000 dead in 11 countries in the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. 31,229 were confirmed dead in Sri Lanka and 131,028 in Indonesia, mostly in Aceh province on the island of Sumatra. The official death toll in Burma was 61, although witnesses put it closer to 600.

Source: Agencies