Aid agencies seeking help for Asia

Aid agencies are struggling to cope with the scale of the Asian tsunami disaster and are hoping for a boost in online donations to help finance relief efforts.

The death toll had reached 40,000 people in 11 countries by Tuesday morning, according to the Associated Press.

"The enormity of the disaster is unbelievable," said Bekele Geleta, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Southeast Asia.

Relief teams in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, two of the worst affected nations, sought to prevent the spread of disease from rotting corpses and putrefied water by burying corpses in mass graves and flying in shelter and water sanitation kits.

"This is a massive humanitarian disaster and with communications so bad in many areas, we still don't know the full scale of it," Oxfam Community Aid Abroad executive director Andrew Hewett told reporters in Australia.