Nagapattinam, January 4 In the relief camps and devastated villages here, it’s an epidemic of quacks and self-styled ‘‘volunteer doctors’’ that’s proving to be the real health hazard.

The quacks are moving in, looking to make a quick kill. Their timing is perfect: the survivors got their first cash aid, Rs 400 each, from the government two days ago—and there is more on the way.

Besides there are the many ‘‘volunteer doctors’’, most of who can’t possibly tell a vein from a muscle, handing out a cocktail of drugs or busy pushing IV fluid needles into people lying too exhausted to move around — on the streetside, in the camps, or wherever they are found.

There’s an equally grave threat. Desperate to get themselves healed quick, and mostly illiterate, survivors in many of the 90-odd camps are going under a potentially dangerous deluge of drugs of various kinds, all thrust free into their hands—with no medical diagnosis, supervision, dosage instructions, or follow-up.

In the Neelayadatchi temple in Nagore, which is doubling up as a survival camp for the hundreds that the waves left homeless, doctors had to work hard on a man who took a handful of antibiotics that someone gave him for his ear infection. He took them all at a time, wanting to be cured faster. In Thirutere, a government medical team was horrified to find a couple of men with an IV fluid pouch trying their best to force its needle into a man who had collapsed on the road. Neither had anything to do with medicine.

In yet another instance, in Akkaraipettai, a group of medical volunteers said they found a couple feeding their two-year-old son unidentifiable small capsules that someone gave them, ‘‘so that he will have no disease’’. The couple themselves were eating some white tablets that were also supplied free, since those were too big for the child anyway.

‘‘Yes, this is a problem,’’ conceded Shantaseela Nayar, the state secretary for rural development who is heading a battery of IAS officers supervising relief operations here. ‘‘We are trying to alert the villagers, but it isn’t easy at this point,’’ she said.

Nayar said the government was aware of the threat potential. ‘‘The quacks are a definite threat, especially in the affected remote coastal villages that are difficult to monitor closely. They hand out everything from paracetamol to anti-malarials to anti-cholera drugs to antibiotics, and treat everything from bruises to ENT problems—or worse. The drugs can be very dangerous without medical supervision and dosage instructions. Some of these could even lead to serious cases like kidney damage. There’s also an assortment of traditional healers going around the villages. But at least, in their case, we hope the medicines won’t harm as much,’’ she said.

According to Nayar, the current official estimate is that about 8,000 people in the camps need urgent medical support. Of these, about 5,000 need psychosocial intervention, not medicines.

A top district official said there are suspect NGOs operating on their own, away from the coordinating loop, carting all sorts of free medicines that they hand out at will to the tsunami-battered. Too many have no qualified doctors with them.