Troops dug burial pits in this quake-shattered town and black smoke poured from crematorium chimneys elsewhere in central China as priorities began shifting Thursday from the hunt for survivors to dealing with the dead. Officials said the final toll could more than double to 50,000.
As the massive military-led recovery operation inched farther into regions cut off by Monday’s quake, the government sought to enlist the public’s help with an appeal for everything from hammers to cranes and, in a turnabout, began accepting foreign aid missions, the first from regional rival Japan, AP reported.

Chinese rescuers search for survivors under a collapsed building in the earthquake-struck county of Shifang in southwest ChinaÕs Sichuan province May 15.

Millions of survivors left homeless or too terrified to go indoors faced their fourth night under tarpaulins, tents or nothing at all as workers patched roads and cleared debris to reach more outlying towns in the disaster zone.
On Friday, Chinese President Hu Jintao flew to Sichuan to support victims and express “appreciation to the public and cadres in the disaster zone,“ the official Xinhua News Agency said.
State media said that rescuers had finally reached all 58 counties and townships severely damaged.
Health officials said there have been no outbreaks of disease so far, with workers rushing to inoculate survivors against disease, supply them with drinking water, and find ways to dispose of an overwhelming number of corpses.
“There are still bodies in the hills, and pits are being dug to bury them,“ said Zhao Xiaoli, a nurse in the ruined town of Hanwang. “There’s no way to bring them down. It’s too dangerous.“
But the ministry said on its website that to prevent disease, bodies should be cleaned on the spot and buried as soon as possible.
Experts said hope was quickly fading for anyone still caught in the wreckage of homes, schools, offices and factories that collapsed in the magnitude-7.9 quake, the most powerful in three decades in quake-prone China.
With more than 130,000 soldiers and police mobilized in the relief effort, roads were cleared Thursday to two key areas that took the brunt of the quake, with workers making it to Wenchuan at the epicenter and also through to Beichuan county, the Xinhua reported. Communication cables were also reconnected to Wenchuan.
In an appeal posted on its website, the Ministry of Information Industry called on the Chinese to donate rescue equipment including hammers, shovels, demolition tools and rubber boats--100 cranes were also needed, it said.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has also issued an emergency appeal for medical help, food, water and tents.
After initially refusing offers of foreign aid workers, China welcomed a Japanese rescue team. Made up of firefighters, police, coast guard and aid officials, the first half of the team arrived in Beijing on Thursday.
The Foreign Ministry said Russian, South Korean and Singaporean teams would join soon.
China had so far received international aid worth more than $100 million and materials worth more than $10 million, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a briefing. But it still needed supplies of tents, clothes, communication equipment, machines for disaster relief, and medicines, he said.

Obesity contributes to global warming, too. Obese and overweight people require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat, and the problem will worsen as the population literally swells in size, a team at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine says.
This adds to food shortages and higher energy prices, the school’s researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts wrote in the journal Lancet, Reuters reported.
“We are all becoming heavier and it is a global responsibility,“ Edwards said in a telephone interview. “Obesity is a key part of the big picture.“
At least 400 million adults worldwide are obese. The World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2015, 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.
In their model, the researchers pegged 40 percent of the global population as obese with a body mass index of near 30. Many nations are fast approaching or have surpassed this level, Edwards said.
BMI is a calculation of height to weight, and the normal range is usually considered to be 18 to 25, with more than 25 considered overweight and above 30 obese.
The researchers found that obese people require 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 calories to maintain daily activities, 18 percent more than someone with a stable BMI.
Because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than rely on cars, a slimmer population would lower demand for fuel for transportation and for agriculture, Edwards said.
This is also important because 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions stem from agriculture, he added.
The next step is quantifying how much a heavier population is contributing to climate change, higher fuel prices and food shortages, he added.
“Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,“ Edwards and Roberts wrote.