More Than 80,000 Dead or Missing in China Earthquake

More than 80,000 people are dead or missing from China's worst earthquake in decades, the government said on Thursday, as concerns rose that disease, the rainy season and aftershocks could bring yet more pain.

Previously, authorities had said they expected the final death toll to exceed 50,000.

Ten days after the magnitude 7.9 quake rocked the mountainous southwest of the country, relief efforts focused on the 5 million homeless and the millions of others facing disease and possible "secondary disasters".

The death toll from this month's earthquake in central China rose to more than 51,000 Thursday, as officials appealed for international help to provide shelter for millions of people who lost their homes.

A Chinese cabinet spokesman in Beijing, Guo Weimin, gave the latest casualty count after a meeting of ministers in the capital. He said there were 51,151 people dead, a jump of nearly 10,000 over Wednesday's official figures, as well as 29,328 missing and more than 300,000 injured.

At the same time, the Foreign Ministry said China needed global support to gather more than 3.3 million tents for quake survivors sleeping in the open, and to house relief workers in areas where buildings were too damaged by the May 12 quake to provide safe shelter.