"We're expecting a figure of around 150,000 dead," Larsen told journalists in Port-au-Prince of the nationwide toll.

"At the health ministry, we've counted more than 90,000 bodies," he said, including those counted by the United Nations mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH.

"The number of homeless is around one million."

But Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue insisted that 150,000 bodies had already been counted since the January 12 quake.

"We can talk today of 150,000 dead. We should know. They're those that have been collected, that have been buried" in the capital alone, she told journalists at a different press conference.

"It's the CNE (health commission) with the public works ministry, so we can count the number of people buried," she said. "Then there's those that have been buried directly by their families and those that died" in other towns.

Jocelyn Lassegue said on Sunday that "it's very difficult to say" but around 200,000 dead may not yet have been counted, their bodies still trapped under the rubble.

The 7.0-magnitude quake leveled much of the Haitian capital, and caused even more extensive damage to towns nearer the tremor's epicenter, in the Americas' worst ever recorded disaster.

Larsen pledged, despite the damage to government ministries and the overcrowded hospitals, that "the health system continues to operate."

Health programs combatting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other vaccination drives are still in place, he said, although he acknowledged authorities "have a challenge to halt the spread of disease."

The minister said there were no current casualty figures. On Friday the interior ministry said 194,000 people were left injured by the quake.

Larsen meanwhile announced tent shelters were being readied for 400,000 quake victims at camps outside the capital that will initially hold 20,000 people, and in the long term accommodate around one million.

"Two sites have been selected," said the minister, one closer to Port-au-Prince and the other near the town Croix de Bouquets, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) east of the capital.

"We will set up other (camps)," Larsen said, adding that the government was seeking other sites for them.

The International Red Cross has warned that poor sanitation at the crowded refugee camps will likely spawn a public health crisis that will be difficult to contain, adding to a growing post-quake death toll.

Overloaded buses full of quake refugees have been steadily streaming out of the capital as residents seek to escape the rubble-strewn city, after Haitian authorities announced plans to step-up evacuation of the three-million strong capital.

An initial 500,000 people have been urged to leave the squalid conditions in Port-au-Prince as dozens of free buses were made available to what the government promised would be more hygienic tented camps outside the city. Thousands of others were also fleeing the capital on private buses.

The UN World Food Programme has distributed 12 tonnes of food in Haiti, but officials and residents alike stress that the influx of aid is still not sufficient to deal with a growing post-quake humanitarian disaster.

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