The flooding in Pakistan has affected 20 million people—more than the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Kashmir earthquake, and Haitian earthquake combined—in an area roughly the size of Italy.

For all that, it’s attracted only a fraction of the international relief that poured into Haiti following the devastating January quake there. As of early September, only about 60 percent of the $459.7 million requested by the United Nations was forthcoming from donor nations, according to an IRIN article. The United States has donated about $200 million of that.

"Donor fatigue is an issue, but I think it's not an issue for the United States," Eric Shwartz, Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, is quoted as saying in the article.

The United States, though, might have better reasons than most nations, to aid Pakistanis. Among them are the fears that insurgents could take advantage of the chaos and win the hearts of those struggling to survive—giving the Taliban a hold that would affect the situation in nearby Afghanistan.

“We need to address that rapidly to avoid [the Pakistanis'] impatience boiling over, and people exploiting that impatience and I think it's important for all of us to understand that challenge,” Sen. John Kerry told Reuters recently while visiting the Pakistan. “We also share security concerns.”

Ironically, the same issues that draw the United States as a nation to aid the flood-stricken country could be keeping individual Americans from sending aid, speculated Charity Navigator President Ken Berger.

“There has been a tepid response, it is down significantly from other disasters of recent times,” Berger told the Christian Science Monitor. “There could be a host of different reasons—from donor fatigue to people not feeling comfortable because of their concerns about terrorism.”

Donor fatigue appears to be at least equally paralleled by media fatigue, at least in the United States. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found Pakistan flooding took up only four percent of the available news hole for the week of August 16-22. The Haiti earthquake, by contrast, took up 41 percent of the news space available for the week of January 11-17.

“Despite the grim statistics, the disaster has received relatively modest coverage in the U.S. press—at its peak, the flooding story filled four percent of the news hole the week of August 16-22,” wrote Mahvish Shahid Khan for the Project. “That made it the No. 8 story that week, behind such topics as the trial of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and coverage of the 2010 election season.”

Adding to the problem of lagging aid, is the staggering scale of the floods, which make relief efforts very difficult. The floods have affected more than 11,000 villages, damaged nearly 700,000 houses, killed 220,000 cattle, and washed out 1.79 million hectares of cropland, according to Pakistan’s Federal Flood Commission. In the midst of all that destruction, the logistics of getting fresh water and food to individuals can be overwhelming. "Procuring, handling and delivering relief supplies is enormously challenging," United Nations spokesman Farhan Haq told Xinhua.

Perhaps surprisingly, there's been little in the media to suggest that covering the floods has been more difficult than other disasters. But even with that said, the Icelandic volcano eruption in April—which annoyed air travelers but didn’t kill anyone—was covered more extensively.