YANGON - Torrential tropical downpours lashed Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta on Friday, deepening the misery of an estimated 2.5 million destitute survivors of Cyclone Nargis and further hampering the military government's aid efforts.

In the storm-struck town of Kunyangon, around 100 km (60 miles) southwest of Yangon, thousands of men, women and children stood in mud and rain, their hands clasped together in supplication at the occasional passing aid vehicle.

Children mobbed any car that stopped, grimy hands reaching through a window in search of bits of bread or a t-shirt.

Despite such scenes and the latest storm, likely to turn already damaged roads to mud, the former Burma's ruling generals insist their relief operations are running smoothly.

However, they issued an edict in state-run newspapers on Friday saying legal action would be taken against anybody found hoarding or selling relief supplies, amid rumors of local military units expropriating trucks of food, blankets and water.

If emergency supplies do not get through in much greater quantities, foreign governments and aid groups say starvation and disease are very real threats.

Some cholera has been confirmed among survivors, but the number was in line with case levels in previous years, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

"We don't have an explosion of cholera," Maureen Birmingham, acting WHO representative in Thailand, told reporters in Bangkok.

Diarrhea, dysentery and skin infections have afflicted some cyclone refugees crammed into monasteries, schools and other temporary shelters after the devastating May 2 storm.

The WHO, which has sent health kits, bleach and chlorine tablets to treat dirty water, said the peak threat from disease was 10 days to one month after a natural disaster.

EU URGES OPENING UP TO AID

The European Union's top aid official, Louis Michel, met ministers in Yangon on Thursday and urged them to admit foreign aid workers and essential equipment to keep the death toll, which the Red Cross says could be as high as 128,000, from rising.

Myanmar state television raised its official death toll on Thursday to 43,328. Independent experts say the figures are probably far higher, with British officials saying the number of dead and missing may be 200,000.

Michel, like so many other envoys before, had made little headway so far.

"Relations between Myanmar and the international community are difficult," he told Reuters. "But that is not my problem. The time is not for political discussion. It's time to deliver aid to save lives."

Earlier, the reclusive generals, the latest face of 46 years of unbroken military rule, signaled they would not budge on their position of limiting foreign access to the delta, fearful to do so might loosen their vice-like grip on power.

"We have already finished our first phase of emergency relief. We are going onto the second phase, the rebuilding stage," state television quoted Prime Minister Thein Sein as telling his Thai counterpart this week.

Underlining where its main attentions lie, the junta announced an overwhelming vote in favor of an army-backed constitution in a referendum held on May 10 despite calls for a delay in the light of the disaster.

DRIBS AND DRABS

Two weeks after the storm tore through the heavily populated Irrawaddy delta rice bowl, food, medicine and temporary shelter have been sent in dribs and drabs to devastated communities.

In Kunyangon, the junta has started distributing small amounts of emergency food.

But around the town, the countryside remains a mess of half-submerged trees, snapped electricity pylons or bamboo poles -- the skeletal remains of a house -- leaning at crazy angles.

Villagers say they are slowly burying the bloated corpses of friends and relatives that have littered the rice fields for the last two weeks. But the stench of death remains.

The United Nations says more than half a million people may now be in temporary settlements.

Frustrated by the speed of the official response, ordinary people were taking matters into their own hands, sending trucks and vans into the delta with clothes, biscuits, dried noodles, and rice provided by private companies and individuals.

"There are too many people. We just cannot give enough. How can the government act as if nothing happened?" said one volunteer, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals.

With almost total distrust of the government, private aid is being left in the care of Buddhist monasteries, to be distributed by the monkhood, who have immense moral authority.

Going through the roll-call of the needy is a grim task.

"We need to give aid to this family," said one monk pointing to a list in a temple in one village.

"No," another monk interjected. "They're all dead."

YANGON, Myanmar - Another powerful storm is headed toward Myanmar's cyclone-devastated delta and the U.N. is warning of a second wave of deaths.

Thailand's prime minister says, however, that Myanmar officials told him they are in control of the cyclone relief operations and doesn't need foreign experts.

Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej says the Myanmar junta guaranteed that there are no disease outbreaks and no starvation among the estimated 2 million survivors.

Samak says Myanmar does not want any foreign aid workers because they "have their own team to cope with the situation."

Samak was talking to reporters Wednesday after returning from Myanmar's main city of Yangon, where he met with his counterpart, Prime Minister Lt. Gen. Thein Sein.

YANGON- Myanmar's military rulers on Tuesday rejected growing international pressure to accept aid workers, insisting against all the evidence that it had the emergency cyclone relief effort under control.

Even as US President George W. Bush and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon voiced their fury at the country's generals, and aid agencies again warned that time was running out, the regime remained defiant about letting in outsiders.

"The nation does not need skilled relief workers yet," Vice Admiral Soe Thein said in the New Light of Myanmar newspaper, a mouthpiece for the military which has ruled the nation with an iron grip for nearly half a century.

He said the needs of the people following the storm, which has left around 62,000 dead or missing since ripping through the southern Irrawaddy delta on May 2, "have been fulfilled to an extent".

But aid agencies tell a starkly different story, warning that as every day passes without sufficient food, water and shelter, as many as two million people are at risk of adding to the already staggering death toll.

Just hours after the United States sent its first aid plane into the country since the tragedy -- following days of negotiations -- Bush said the world should "be angry and condemn" the junta.

"Either they are isolated or callous," he said. "There's no telling how many people have lost their lives as a result of the slow response."

The United States has long been one of the most vocal critics of the regime, repeatedly tightening sanctions on Myanmar over its refusal to shift towards democracy or release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.

But Ban Ki-Moon also took aim at the junta, using unusually strong language for a UN chief to insist that outside aid experts be allowed in immediately to help direct the fumbling relief effort.

"I want to register my deep concern and immense frustration on the unacceptably slow response to this grave humanitarian crisis," Ban told a news conference at UN headquarters in New York.

"We are at a critical point. Unless more aid gets into the country very quickly, we face an outbreak of infectious diseases that could dwarf today's current crisis," he said.

"I therefore call in the most strenuous terms on the government of Myanmar to put its people's lives first. It must do all it can to prevent this disaster from becoming even more serious."

Myanmar's military regime is also forcing cyclone survivors out forcing cyclone survivors out of their devastated villages and into other parts of the country, the United Nations said.

The country has welcomed donations of aid, even from the United States, which sent in its first planeload of supplies on Monday and said that two more military transporters would follow Tuesday.

But the generals remain deeply suspicious of the outside world and fearful of any outside influence which could weaken their control on every aspect of life in this poor and isolated nation, formerly known as Burma.

Aid groups insist that only specialists with long experience of disaster zones can ensure that the neediest get the aid they need -- and navigate that aid through scenes of almost total destruction.

Eleven days after the disaster struck, thousands of hungry people, including many children , are still lining the roads on the route between the main city Yangon and the low-lying delta that bore the brunt of Cyclone Nargis, begging for food and water.

The storm churned up huge waves that turned the delta rice paddies into a saltwater swamp, and drowned untold numbers of people and animals -- many of whose corpses are still rotting in the tropical heat.

Weakened by hunger, thirst, fatigue and the sheer psychological trauma of their ordeal, survivors face an enormous range of threats -- from dysentery and pneumonia to wind-burn and deadly snake bites.

Myanmar is struggling to feed its people in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis -- in part because the regime has been forcing some farmers to stop growing rice in a plan to produce biofuel instead.

The United Nations said Monday that the current relief effort was running at about 10-20 percent of what was needed, and that although aid flights are arriving, there are serious bottlenecks in getting supplies to the delta.

With access cut off to the south for most outsiders, the full extent of the death and destruction may not be known for months. The United Nations and United States have estimated the number of dead at around 100,000.

In an internal document seen Tuesday, the United Nations said it was receiving reports of the military forcibly pushing families out of their villages and into less-affected areas.