AFRICA/SUDAN - In the past three months 5% of the children under five years old have died, most of them simply because of hunger, diarrhoea and malaria: it is the Darfur emergency. There are huge necessities, caused by the violence, hunger and by the people’s vulnerability to very simple diseases

Thursday, 3 June 2004

Rome (Fides Agency) - According to a recent survey, the people in Darfur (western Sudan) live under the threat of famine. Rates of mortality and malnutrition are dangerously high, and the alimentary situation is worsening quickly. A nutritional survey, performed by Médecins Sans Frontières in the provinces of Wadi Saleh and Mikjar, has revealed that 21.5% of children under five years old in the area suffer from severe malnutrition. Even worse, the survey found out that about 5% of children under five years old and belonging to monitored families, died in the last three months, most of them for simple causes, such as hunger, diarrhoea and malaria. The same high rate of mortality was registered among children over five years old, with 60% of the children dying because of the trauma of war. The results cry out Darfur’s huge necessities, caused by violence, hunger and by the people’s vulnerability to very simple diseases.
Beginning from February 2003, brutal attacks against civilians determined a humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region. Today medical assistance is scarce and food, water and shelters are totally insufficient for about a million displaced people who have fled from violence and continue to live in fear.
Water reserves, wood and food were plundered or destroyed in the attacks against the villages. People did not have the chance to sow and there will be nothing to harvest until the end of the year. The people who fled are weakened by hunger, and have become increasingly vulnerable to simple diseases. With the arrival of the impending rain season, diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea will become deadly.
Continuous attacks against the displaced and the impossibility to sow their land before the coming of the rains make the population completely dependant from outside assistance, which is still too slow. In spite of the ceasefire, violence against civilians increases. The wounded do not seek medical treatment for fear of being identified and kept in custody. The arrival of the rain season, at the end of May, may hinder, or even prevent, humanitarian aid distributions in the Darfur region.
One of the few organisations present in Darfur, succouring over 700,000 displaced, is Médecins Sans Frontières. Together with many local operators, they endeavour to offer medical and food assistance to the displaced gathered in several camps. For these people, who have nothing, MSF has prepared medical centres and started campaigns of vaccination against measles, it has opened therapeutic nutritional centres to treat severely malnourished children and installed distribution systems for drinking water. (AP) (3/6/2004 Fides Agency lines 40 words 484)


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