Workers in protective suits circled collapsed communities in trucks on Monday, spraying disinfectant on rubble from last month's massive earthquake as part of a government campaign to prevent disease outbreaks among the 5 million left homeless. Providing safe food, drinking water and temporary shelters was a priority following the May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people, the Health Ministry said. Bodies discovered in the rubble were being disinfected, ministry spokesman Mao Qun'an said in an interview posted on the central government's Web site. "If we can do those four things properly, we have the confidence to guarantee there will be no epidemics after the disaster,' Mao said. He said there was no evidence of contagious diseases in the quake zone, where survivors were crammed into tents and other temporary shelters. Any bodies that could not be cremated were being buried far from natural water sources to prevent contamination, and more than 10,000 injured people had been transferred to hospitals outside Sichuan for treatment, he said. The smell of disinfectant lingered in Hanwang's silent streets, where police were also on patrol for thieves. Xu Sunyong watched from outside his heavily cracked building as self-employed movers brought down padded chairs and even the front door of his sixth-floor apartment. Thieves had already broken in and stolen his appliances. "Those people deserve to die,' he said with disdain. The confirmed death toll on Monday was 69,019, up just three from a day earlier. Another 18,627 people are still missing, government spokesman Lu Guangjin told a news conference. In a sign of how difficult rescue conditions are in parts of Sichuan, thousands of soldiers combed remote mountains Monday in search of a military helicopter that crashed 48 hours earlier while transporting earthquake victims. The Russian-designed Mi-171 transport had been carrying 19 people, 14 of them people injured in the quake, when it flew into fog and turbulence and crashed near the epicenter of the May 12 quake in the town of Wenchuan on Saturday, state media reported. State broadcaster CCTV said 4,000 soldiers were searching but gave no word on survivors. China has relied heavily on its 250-strong fleet of Mi-171s to transport supplies and relief workers and evacuate the injured from widely scattered towns in the mountainous area where roads were wiped out by landslides. Meanwhile, soldiers completed work on a channel to divert water from a lake formed when landslides triggered by the quake blocked the Tongkou river. Water levels in the lake had been rising steadily and threatened to flood surrounding areas, prompting authorities to evacuate nearly 200,000 people already uprooted by the quake. Nine surveillance cameras that could provide a live feed to officials in Beijing were set up at the quake lake Sunday, and night vision capability was being installed Monday, the Chengdu Evening Newspaper reported, quoting Zheng Ming, an official with a Shanghai telecom company with a team at the site. Downstream villages stood mostly empty Monday after police and soldiers ordered people out, although some families were holding out for further confirmation. A reconstruction committee under the National Development and Reform Committee, the Cabinet's top economic planning body, has agreed on a list of tasks and a general schedule for completion, the NDRC said in a news release issued Monday. It gave no details and did not say when the list was agreed. Committee members have dedicated themselves to a reconstruction plan that is "of high quality, that will stand the test of time, allow victims to rebuild their homesteads, and create a solid foundation and conditions for wider scale reconstruction,' the news release said. Authorities have rushed to construct tent camps and prefabricated housing for the millions of homeless ahead of the summer rainy season and the expected hordes of disease-bearing mosquitoes. Elsewhere in the quake zone, Hossam Elsharkawi, head of support operations for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said his organization was preparing to bring in two large water purification units that will provide clean water to 15,000 people each. "The government is doing an excellent job in urban areas, but it's taking time in places like this because it is so dispersed,' said Elsharkawi, speaking in the village of Jiulong village, just north of the provincial capital of Chengdu. Elsharkawi said the federation expected to be helping with relief work in Sichuan for three years and would ship in 100,000 tents by the end of June. A Japanese commercial chartered flight was delivering 400 tents to Chengdu on Monday, the first batch of a planned donation of 1,200 tents. While describing the scale of the disaster as "massive,' Elsharkawi praised the government's rapidly moving recovery effort and mobilization of aid. "They can teach the world a thing or two on responding to such large-scale disasters,' he said. Although no Americans were reported killed in the quake, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing sent an updated alert advising travelers to avoid the quake zone and be prepared for delays in other parts of Sichuan.