Tuesday, 12 July 2011

We haven’t lost a child for 12 days but the starving and the sick keep pouring in


Says charity Doctor

ONE-year-old Abdinur Bare lies in the hospital bed by the door.

How she will leave it, at this moment, no one knows.
Her grandmother Hawa, 40, watches the child cling to life with eyes that fail to hide her turmoil.
Across the hallway they are busily caring for 60 starving children in two intensive care wards.
The drought in East Africa is the worst in 60 years. More than 10million people are now thought to be affected, across Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.
As the three-hourly "therapeutic milk" feed arrives, two pinpricks of light in Abdinur's eyes give us all hope - though her desperately emaciated frame drains it away.
Everywhere along the ward, children and their parents sprawl beneath blue mosquito netting.
In total across Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp, nearly 120 children live like this.
"We haven't lost a child in 12 days," says Antoine Froidevaux, the field co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) "but we are seeing more malnourished children arrive every day."
In this camp - crammed with nearly 370,000 people - he fears many of the most starved children never even make it to the wards.
He also warns that the camp itself has become a danger to those it struggles to protect.
"It has become far, far too big for what it is meant for," he says.
"A few days ago a survey found that many children on the outskirts of the camp are now actually more malnourished living around the camp than after they first arrive."
Yet thousands continue to come - many from as far as 260 miles away.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3689514/Sun-man-reports-from-the-Horn-of-Africa-drought-crisis.html#ixzz1RvlX1HRv

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