More than 6,000 quake survivors have fled dangerous areas and nearly 20,000 more are set to seek refuge in camps, said Kilian Kleinschmidt, the agency's senior emergency coordinator for the South Asia earthquake.

"The likelihood of larger displacement due to the ongoing monsoon is very grave," Kleinschmidt told AFP in an interview late Thursday.

"It is very big and we have already seen more than 6,000 newcomers into camps over the last three weeks" in the Pakistani Kashmir towns of Bagh, Garhi Habibullah and Muzaffarabad, he said.

"Currently there are 32,000 people in organised camps and we estimate up to 50,000 by the end of the monsoon."

Donors and aid agencies are meeting to prepare for the feared second wave of refugees, Kleinschmidt said. Pakistani officials confirmed that 6,615 quake survivors had been moved from 23 villages in areas threatened by landslides.

The UN official's warning came as 15 earthquake survivors including eight children were killed by landslides and floods in northwest Pakistan on Thursday. Another 12 died last week.

The massive 7.6-magnitude earthquake on October 8, 2005 killed 75,000 people, mostly in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir, and left around three million people homeless.

Kleinschmidt said that the temblor had further destabilised mountains which were already prone to landslides, creating a new threat for many people who had only recently returned to their home villages to rebuild their lives.

The number of survivors in camps peaked at 200,000 after the quake.

"The effects of the monsoon rains this year, especially if they continue as they are now, would be more difficult for the people affected in the earthquake zone than they used to be," he said.

The landslides also threaten transport links to the Himalayan region's remote villages, which are still partly dependent on aid and produce from the outside world.

Landslides last week blocked major roads from Muzaffarabad to Kashmir's Neelum Valley where thousands of people live.

With 160 possible landslide sites identified along the 650 kilometres (400 miles) of roads in Kashmir, the problem for Pakistani authorities is to know where to start, Kleinschmidt said.

"This for any engineering capacity in the world is an almost impossible situation. This capacity will certainly be required for the coming winter and already now it is an issue for some areas," he added.

Two helicopters would transport aid during the monsoon season, for which a donor had pledged aid, the UN official told AFP.

Helicopters were credited for preventing a second wave of deaths after the earthquake.

But the next winter -- when much of the region is snowbound and temperatures regularly plummet below freezing -- would pose a big challenge to aid workers and the Pakistani government, Kleinschmidt said.

"We do not want to raise an alarm to say that there will be a disaster, all we are saying is that we have to responsibly plan for this," he said, adding that the UN and other agencies must steer reconstruction in the quake-hit area.

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