Tag Archives: Malnutrition

Recovering from severe malnutrition in Yemen

Recovering from severe malnutrition in Yemen

By Abduljabbar Zeyad

HODEIDAH, Yemen (Reuters) – Smiling and sitting down to bread and milk with her family, Yemeni teenager Saida Ahmed Baghili is barely recognizable a year on from the photo of her emaciated frame that came to symbolize the country’s humanitarian crisis.

Baghili now weighs 36kg (80 lb), according to her father, more than triple the 11kg she weighed last October when Reuters first met her at the al-Thawra hospital in Sana’a, where she was undergoing treatment for severe malnutrition.

There the 19-year-old was unable to talk, let alone carry her ghostly, skeletal frame, which is now stronger after weeks of specialist care and time at home.

“Saida’s body got better because she’s eating better, but she’s still having trouble swallowing,” her father Ahmed Baghili said at their home in Hodeidah this month.

“She can only eat milk, biscuits and juice.”

Baghili’s plight reflects that of many families in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country, where a two-and-a-half-year war between a Saudi-led Arab coalition and the Iran-allied Houthi movement has claimed 10,000 lives.

A quarter of the 28 million population are starving, according to the United Nations, with half a million children under the age of 5 severely malnourished and at least 2,135 people killed by cholera.

Ahmed Baghili is only able to supply the basics for his family of 10, who live in a parched village on the Red Sea coast.

Saida, whose illness began before the war, is able to help her father tend to a farmer’s cattle in exchange for milk, with their income boosted by Ahmed making deliveries on his motorcycle and donations from humanitarian organizations.

However, he says he doesn’t have enough money to send Saida for further treatment and still fears for her health. Her last appointment with a doctor was in December.

“We’re worried she might relapse and then we wouldn’t be able to do anything because we have nothing. We don’t have the transportation fee, we don’t have the fee for anything,” he said.

Click on http://reut.rs/2gxeJkK to see a related photo essay

(Writing by Patrick Johnston in LONDON; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Cholera claims unborn children as epidemic spreads Yemen misery

Children wait to be treated at a cholera treatment center in Sanaa, Yemen May 15, 2017. Picture taken May 15, 2017.

By Abduljabbar Zeyad

HODEIDAH, Yemen (Reuters) – One of the latest victims of the cholera epidemic that has killed more than 2,000 people in Yemen had yet to even take her first breath.

Her mother Safaa Issa Kaheel, then nine months pregnant, was brought into a crowded clinic in the Western port city of Hodeidah by her husband, who had to borrow the travel fare from a neighbor. “My stomach started hurting more and more,” said Kaheel, 37, a hydrating drip hooked into her arm.

Once there, she was referred by nurse Hayam al-Shamaa for an ultrasound scan which showed her baby had died of dehydration – one of 15 to perish in the womb due to cholera in September and October, according to doctors at the city’s Thawra hospital.

“I felt like death,” Kaheel said, her voice strained. “Thank god I survived the (delivery), but my diarrhea hasn’t stopped.”

The Red Cross has warned that cholera, a diarrheal disease that has been eradicated in most developed countries, could infect a million people in Yemen by the end of the year.

Two and a half years of war have sapped Yemen of the money and medical facilities it needs to battle the contagion, to which aid agencies and medics say the poor, the starving, the pregnant and the young are most vulnerable.

The cholera ward is full of children – some writhing in agony, others eerily still. The blanket over one boy too weak to move rises and falls with his shallow breathing.

Save the Children said in August that children under 15 represent nearly half of new cases and a third of deaths, with malnourished children more than six times more likely to die of cholera than well-fed ones.

Millions of Yemenis are struggling to find food and the baking desert plains around Hodeidah are hotspots both of hunger and sickness.

Yemen’s war pits the armed Houthi movement against the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which is backed by a Saudi-led coalition that has launched thousands of air strikes to restore him to power.

At least 10,000 people have been killed in the conflict.

The country’s health sector has been badly battered while a struggle over the central bank has left public sector salaries for doctors and sanitation workers unpaid.

Soumaya Beltifa, spokesperson for the Red Cross in Sanaa, warned that a lack of funds and health personnel were blunting efforts to eradicate the disease, making it unlikely Yemen would be healthy again soon.

“The cholera epidemic has become a norm, leading to complacency in dealing with the disease, not only by civilians but also from the various (aid) organizations,” she warned.

 

Babies starve as war grinds on in Mosul

Patients Iraqi children lie at a hospital run by Medecins Sans Frontieres in Qayyara, Iraq April 6, 2017. Picture taken April 6, 2016. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Isabel Coles

QAYYARA, Iraq (Reuters) – The babies cry with hunger but are so severely malnourished that doctors treating them at a hospital in Iraq would make their condition worse if they fed them enough to stop the pangs.

Many of the starving infants are from Mosul, where war between Islamic State militants and Iraqi forces is taking a heavy toll on several hundred thousand civilians trapped inside the city.

A new, specialist ward was opened recently to deal with the growing number of children from Mosul showing signs of malnutrition as the conflict grinds on -– most of them less than six-months-old.

That means they were born around the time Iraqi forces severed Islamic State’s last major supply route from Mosul to Syria, besieging the militants inside the city, but also creating acute shortages of food.

“Normally nutritional crises are much more common in Africa and not in this kind of country,” said pediatrician Rosanna Meneghetti at the hospital, which is run by aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Qayyara, about 60 km (40 miles) south of Mosul. “We did not anticipate this”.

So far, the number of cases recorded is below the level considered critical but it nonetheless highlights the hardship faced by civilians who are effectively being held hostage by Islamic State.

Iraqi forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition have retaken most of the city but are struggling to dislodge the militants from several districts in the west, including the Old City.

Residents who have managed to escape say there is almost nothing to eat but flour mixed with water and boiled wheat grain.

What little food remains is too expensive for most residents to afford, or kept for Islamic State members and their supporters.

FORMULA MILK SHORTAGE

In the ward, a team of doctors monitors the babies’ progress in grams, feeding them a special peanut-based paste that will gradually accustom them to eating and increase their weight.

On one bed lies a six-month-old boy weighing 2.4 kg – less than half the median weight for an infant of that age.

The diminutive patients are also treated for other diseases associated with malnutrition, which weakens the immune system, making them even more vulnerable.

“It’s a new thing in Iraq,” said MSF project coordinator Isabelle Legall. “Most of the (Iraqi) doctors have never seen it (malnutrition)”.

Part of the problem, Legall said, is a lack of tradition of breast-feeding among Iraqi mothers, who usually raise their babies on formula milk, which is now almost impossible to come by in Mosul.

Even if they want to breastfeed, many mothers find it difficult due to the physical and emotional strain of living in a warzone: “The mother is very stressed and can’t find much food herself so cannot produce so much milk,” Meneghetti said.

One of the mothers from Mosul told the doctors she had no option but to feed her baby sugar dissolved in water, yogurt, or a mixture of flour and water.

“All of this is because of Daesh (Islamic State),” said another mother, keeping vigil over her emaciated baby.

Some of the babies come from villages that were retaken from Islamic State months ago, pointing to a wider trend of food insecurity.

TWO PATIENTS TO A BED

On average, more than half the patients seen in the emergency room of the MSF hospital are under the age of 15, partly because there is a shortage of pediatricians in the area, so many children are referred there.

Signs on the doors of the portacabins that house different wards prohibit visitors from entering with weapons.

The pediatric ward is so full there are two patients to each bed, and most of the women’s wing is taken up by children recovering from war injuries such as broken limbs, burns and shrapnel.

Many babies are brought to the hospital with respiratory problems such as bronchiolitis and pneumonia -– most of them from camps for the displaced, where cramped conditions enable viruses to spread.

Two children buried under blankets are suffering from birth asphyxia which occurs when a baby’s brain and other organs do not get enough oxygen before, during or immediately after being born.

Meneghetti said their mothers had probably needed a surgical birth but were unable to reach a hospital so delivered at home and experienced complications.

Lying listless on another bed is a boy who was wounded by shrapnel when his father picked up a box of explosives, intending to move the danger away. It blew up in his hands, wounding them both along with several other family members.

The expression on eight-year-old Dua Nawaf’s face is haunting.

The girl suffered burns to the head and hands in an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition that killed more than 100 people in the Mosul Jadida district last month, including both her parents.

“The family told me this morning that she (Dua) had some problems, especially in the night, so we are organising a mental health (assessment) for her,” Meneghetti said, reaching into her pocket for a balloon, which she inflated and gave to the girl.

Only the faintest hint of a smile appeared on Dua’s face.

(Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Yemen war erases decade of health gains, many children starving: UNICEF

UNICEF logo

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Yemen has lost a decade’s worth of gains in public health as a result of war and economic crisis, with increasing numbers of children succumbing to malnutrition, the United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday.

An estimated 3.3 million people, including 2.2 million children, across the Arab peninsula’s poorest country are suffering from acute malnutrition, and 460,000 under the age of five have severe acute malnutrition, the agency said.

The most severe form leaves young children vulnerable to life-threatening diarrhoeal diseases and respiratory infections.

“What worries us is the severe acute malnutrition because it is killing children,” Meritxell Relano, UNICEF representative in Yemen, told Reuters in Geneva.

“Because of the crumbling health system, the conflict and economic crisis, we have gone back to 10 years ago. A decade has been lost in health gains,” she said, with 63 out of every 1,000 live births now dying before their fifth birthday, against 53 children in 2014.

Children and pregnant and lactating women are most heavily affected by the malnutrition crisis in the northern province of Saada, in the coastal area of Hodeida and in Taiz in the south, she said.

UNICEF mobile teams aim to screen more children and reach 323,000 severely malnourished children this year, up from 237,000 last year, Relano said, adding that partner agencies would target the rest.

The Yemeni conflict, which pits a Saudi-led Arab coalition against the Iran-allied Houthi movement, has left more than half of the country’s 28 million people “food insecure”, with seven million of them enduring hunger, the United Nations has said.

Jamie McGoldrick, the top U.N. aid official in the country, told Reuters on Friday that Yemen has roughly three months’ supply of wheat left to draw from, leaving the country exposed to serious disruption as a central bank crisis cuts food imports and starvation deepens.

Relano said UNICEF had made progress in delivering supplies of energy-rich foods for severely malnourished children.

“We managed to bring supplies into the country. We have 50 percent in the country secured for this year,” she said.

UNICEF is seeking $236.5 million for Yemen this year, as part of its overall appeal of $3.3 billion to help women and children in 48 countries.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Myanmar allows food aid delivery to conflict-torn region

Children recycle goods from the ruins of a market which was set on fire at a Rohingya village outside Maugndaw in Rakhine state, Myanmar,

By Simon Lewis

YANGON (Reuters) – Myanmar is allowing the first food deliveries for more than four weeks to the troubled north of Rakhine state, the UN humanitarian agency announced on Monday, amid an ongoing military lockdown of the area.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement that the World Food Programme had been granted permission to deliver aid to four villages, but repeated a call for full access to the area where tens of thousands remain cut off from assistance.

Rakhine Buddhists who fled from recent violence in Maungdaw pass their time in a temporary shelter at a stadium in Sittwe, Myanmar, Octobe

Rakhine Buddhists who fled from recent violence in Maungdaw pass their time in a temporary shelter at a stadium in Sittwe, Myanmar, October 25, 2016. Picture taken October 25, 2016. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun

“This is the first time humanitarian access has been granted to the affected areas of Maungdaw Township since the violence that erupted on 9 October,” the statement said.

Security forces have fanned out in the Muslim-majority region seeking the perpetrators of attacks in early October in which nine border guard police officers were killed.

The government believes a group of some 400 Rohingya Muslims with links to Islamists overseas planned and executed the attacks.

At least 33 alleged attackers and five government soldiers have been killed. Another police officer was also killed by motorcycle-riding assailants in the latest incident on Thursday, according to state media.

The military has designated the area an “operation zone,” blocking aid deliveries to the Rohingya population and barring foreign journalists and observers from entering.

Human rights monitors and members of the mostly stateless Rohingya community say troops have shot civilians on sight, raped Rohingya women and looted and burned homes during the operation.

The government, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, denies any abuses have been committed.

Diplomats and the United Nations have been pushing an independent investigation, as well as for aid access to be resumed in the Maungdaw area.

“The UN continues to advocate strongly for full access to all affected areas to assess and respond to all humanitarian needs and to resume pre-existing humanitarian activities,” the OCHA said.

The high-level diplomatic mission from the UN, United States and Britain visited the area last week and told reporters officials had agreed to allow the resumption of pre-existing aid programs in the area and to extend assistance to newly displaced people.

Approximately 150,000 people had been cut off from food, cash and nutrition assistance for the past four weeks, the statement said.

WFP had been granted access to four affected villages, it said, without stating how many people would be reached.

OCHA’s head of office in Myanmar, Mark Cutts, said in a post on Twitter it was “welcome news that some food aid in #Maungdaw given go-ahead, but thousands of malnourished children still waiting for life-saving treatment.”

Before the current crises erupted, there was a malnutrition rate of 19 percent among children aged under five in Maungdaw, according to statistics cited in a WFP report in May.

(Editing by Nick Macfie)

Disease stalks Yemen as hospitals, clinics devastated by war

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – More than half of war-battered Yemen’s hospitals and clinics are closed or only partially functioning, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday, warning a lack of adequate health services was increasing the risk of disease outbreaks.

Only 45 percent of 3,507 health facilities surveyed by WHO were fully functional and accessible, while more than 40 percent of districts faced a “critical” shortage of doctors, WHO said.

“These critical shortages in health services mean that more people are deprived of access to life-saving interventions,” WHO said in a statement.

“Absence of adequate communicable diseases management increases the risk of outbreaks such cholera, measles, malaria and other endemic diseases.”

The 18-month-old conflict between a Saudi Arabia-led coalition and the Iran-aligned Houthi group which controls much of northern Yemen has destroyed much of Yemen’s infrastructure, killed more than 10,000 people and displaced millions.

UNICEF says the humanitarian disaster in the country has left 7.4 million children in need of medical help and 370,000 at risk of severe acute malnutrition.

Yemen’s Health Ministry announced a cholera outbreak in early October in the capital Sanaa. By the end of the month, WHO said the number of suspected cholera cases had ballooned to more than 1,400.

In 42 percent of 276 districts surveyed by WHO there were only two doctors or less, while in nearly a fifth of districts there were none.

WHO said new mothers and their babies lacked essential ante-natal care and immunization services, while people suffering from acute or chronic conditions were forced to spend more on treatment or forgo treatment altogether.

(Reporting by Magdalena Mis; Editing by Ros Russell)

A picture and its story: Severe malnutrition in Yemen

Malnourished woman with her relative at Yemeni hospital

By Abduljabbar Zeyad

HODAIDA, Yemen (Reuters) – The emaciated frame of 18-year-old Saida Ahmad Baghili lies on a hospital bed in the red sea port city of Hodaida, her suffering stark evidence of the malnutrition spread by Yemen’s 19-month civil war.

Baghili arrived at the Al Thawra hospital on Saturday. She is bed-ridden and unable to eat, surviving on a diet of juice, milk and tea, medical staff and a relative said.

“The problem is malnutrition due to (her) financial situation and the current (war) situation at this time,” Asma Al Bhaiji, a nurse at the hospital, told Reuters on Tuesday.

The 18-year-old is one of more than 14 million people, over half of Yemen’s population, who are short of food, with much of the country on the brink of famine, according to the United Nations.

Her picture is a reminder of the humanitarian crisis in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country where at least 10,000 people have been killed in fighting between Saudi-led Arab coalition and the Iran-allied Houthi movement.

Baghili is from the small village of Shajn, about 100 km (60 miles) southwest of the city of Hodaida, and used to work with sheep before developing signs of malnutrition five years ago, according to her aunt, Saida Ali Baghili.

“She was fine. She was in good health. There was nothing wrong with her. And then she got sick,” Ali Baghili told Reuters.

“She has been sick for five years. She can’t eat. She says her throat hurts.”

After the war began, Baghili’s condition deteriorated with her family lacking the money for treatment.

She lost more weight and in the last two months developed diarrhoea.

“Her father couldn’t (afford to) send her anywhere (for treatment) but some charitable people helped out,” Ali Baghili said, without elaborating who the donors were.

(Writing by Patrick Johnston in LONDON Editing by Alison Williams)

Without aid, 49,000 children will die this year in northeast Nigeria

Chadian refugee Fatime Hassan, 7, poses for a picture in Darnaim refugee camp, Lake Chad region, Chad

LAGOS (Reuters) – Nearly half a million children around Lake Chad face “severe acute malnutrition” due to drought and a seven-year insurgency by Islamist militant group Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, UNICEF said on Thursday.

Of the 475,000 deemed at risk, 49,000 in Nigeria’s Borno state, Boko Haram’s heartland, will die this year if they do not receive treatment, according to the United Nations’ child agency, which is appealing for $308 million to cope with the crisis.

However, to date, UNICEF said it had only received $41 million, 13 percent of what it needs to help those affected in the four countries – Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon – that border Lake Chad.

At the start of 2015, Boko Haram occupied an area the size of Belgium but has since been pushed back over the last 18 months by military assaults by the four countries.

Most of its remaining forces are now hiding in the wilds of the vast Sambisa forest, southeast of the Borno provincial capital, Maiduguri.

UNICEF said that as Nigerian government forces captured and secured territory, aid officials were starting to piece together the scale of the humanitarian disaster left behind in the group’s wake. “Towns and villages are in ruins and communities have no access to basic services,” UNICEF said in a report.

In Borno, nearly two thirds of hospitals and clinics had been partially or completely destroyed and three-quarters of water and sanitation facilities needed to be rehabilitated.

Despite the military gains, UNICEF said, 2.2 million people remain trapped in areas under the control of Boko Haram – which is trying to establish a caliphate in the southern reaches of the Sahara – or are staying in camps, fearful of going home.

Boko Haram is thought to have killed as many as 15,000 people since the launch of its insurgency in 2009.

Responding to its battlefield setbacks, Boko Haram has turned to suicide bombings, many involving children.

UNICEF said it had recorded 38 cases of child suicide bombings so far this year, against 44 in the whole of 2015 and just four the year before that.

(Reporting by Ed Cropley; editing by Mark Heinrich)

U.N. war crimes investigators gathering testimony from starving Syrian town

BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) – Residents of a besieged Syrian town have told U.N. investigators how the weakest in their midst, deprived of food and medicines in violation of international law, are suffering starvation and death, the top U.N. war crimes investigator told Reuters on Tuesday.

An aid convoy on Monday brought the first food and medical relief for three months to the western town of Madaya, where 40,000 people are trapped by encircling government forces.

But Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the U.N. commission of inquiry documenting war crimes in Syria, said his team remained “gravely concerned” about the humanitarian situation there.

“As part of our investigations, the Commission has been in direct contact with residents currently living inside Madaya,” he said in an emailed reply to Reuters questions.

“They have provided detailed information on shortages of food, water, qualified physicians, and medicine. This has led to acute malnutrition and deaths among vulnerable groups in the town,” he said in the email sent from his native Brazil.

The U.N. inquiry, composed of independent experts, has long denounced use of starvation by both sides in the Syrian conflict as a weapon of war, and has a confidential list of suspected war criminals and units from all sides which is kept in a U.N. safe in Geneva.

“Siege tactics, by their nature, target the civilian population by subjecting them to starvation, denial of basic essential services and medicines,” Pinheiro said on Tuesday.

“Such methods of warfare are prohibited under international humanitarian law and violate core human rights obligations with regard to the rights to adequate food, health and the right to life, not to mention the special duty of care owed to the well-being of children.”

Rebel forces are also besieging the government-held villages of Foua and Kafraya in Idlib province, where U.N. supplies were also delivered on Monday, Pinheiro noted. Islamic State fighters are besieging government-held areas of Deir al-Zor, he added.

Aid workers who reached Madaya spoke of “heartbreaking” conditions being endured by emaciated and starving residents, with hundreds in need of specialized medical help.

“It’s really heartbreaking to see the situation of the people,” said Pawel Krzysiek of the International Committee of the Red Cross. “A while ago I was just approached by a little girl and her first question was did you bring food … we are really hungry.”

The World Health Organization said it had asked the Syrian government to allow it to send mobile clinics and medical teams to Madaya to assess the extent of malnutrition and evacuate the worst cases.

A local doctor said 300 to 400 people needed special medical care, according to Elizabeth Hoff, the WHO representative in Damascus who went into Madaya with the convoy.

“I am really alarmed,” Hoff told Reuters by telephone from Damascus, where she is based.

“People gathered in the market place. You could see many were malnourished, starving. They were skinny, tired, severely distressed. There was no smile on anybody’s face. It is not what you see when you arrive with a convoy. The children I talked to said they had no strength to play.”

FOOD WEAPON CONDEMNED

Western diplomats have also condemned the use of food as a weapon of war, with the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, accusing the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of “grotesque starve-or-surrender tactics”.

Britain’s U.N. ambassador, Matthew Rycroft, said “wilfully impeding relief supply and access can constitute a violation of international humanitarian law”.

Legal experts said that could be construed as either a war crime or a crime against humanity, or both.

However, there appears little immediate prospect of such a case being brought before the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, since Syria is not a member and any referral to the court by the U.N. Security Council would have to overcome Russian reluctance.

The difficulties in getting aid into Madaya and other besieged places could also set back efforts to hold new peace talks on the five-year-old war in Syria, scheduled to take place under U.N. auspices in Geneva on Jan. 25.

A U.N. road map for the talks calls on the parties to allow aid agencies unhindered access throughout Syria, particularly in besieged and hard-to-reach areas.

An opposition grouping has told the United Nations that this must happen before the talks can begin, lending weight to suggestions that the humanitarian situation could make Jan. 25 a hard target to hit.

Negotiations to get into Madaya and the other two villages near Idlib were lengthy and difficult. There are presently about 15 siege locations in Syria, where 450,000 people are trapped, the United Nations says.

The main opposition coordinator, Riad Hijab, said the United States had backtracked over the departure of President Bashar al-Assad as part of any settlement and this meant the opposition would face hard choices on whether to attend the talks.

The WHO intends to return to Madaya on Thursday as part of a U.N. convoy with more medical and food supplies, Hoff said.

ICRC spokeswoman Dibeh Fakhr also said its next distribution is planned for Thursday. The aid consists of blankets and medicine as well as food.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Additional reporting by Tom Miles, Lisa Barrington, Kinda Makieh and Lou Charbonneau; Writing by Giles Elgood, editing by Peter Millership and David Stamp)