Rescuers scoured the sea for missing tourists in Asia on today and fears of disease grew as emergency services struggled with rotting bodies from a devastating tsunami that killed more than 22,700 people.
The disaster spared no one. Western tourists were killed sunbathing on beaches, poor villagers drowned in homes by the sea and fishermen died in flimsy boats. The 21-year-old grandson of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej was killed on a jet-ski.
"We have a long way to go in collecting bodies," said Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who expected the 866 death toll in his country to go much higher. One Thai official estimated up to 30 percent of the dead were foreigners.
Hundreds were buried in mass graves in India while hospitals and morgues in Sri Lanka and Indonesia struggled to cope with injured and bewildered victims and bloated corpses.
"It smells so bad ... The human bodies are mixed in with dead animals like dogs, fish, cats and goats," said Marine Colonel Buyung Lelana, head of an evacuation team in Indonesia's Aceh province on the island of Sumatra.
Sri Lanka was hardest hit by the tsunami -- a wall of water triggered by the world's biggest earthquake in 40 years with a magnitude of 9.0 that erupted off the northern Indonesian coast.
The death toll in Sri Lanka nearly doubled on Monday to 10,200 with 200 foreign tourists feared dead. The final toll could be much higher, even double, officials said.
Other areas worst affected by Sunday's tsunami were southern India, where more than 6,600 were listed dead, northern Indonesia with nearly 5,000 drowned and Thailand's devastated southern tourist isles and beaches.
With at least seven Asian nations and one in East Africa counting the human and economic cost of the tragedy, Western nations pledged aid and geologists asked why warning systems that could have saved thousands of lives were not in place.