Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 02-10-2017
The United Nation (UN) says more than 14,100 Rohingya Muslim children are at risk of dying from malnutrition in wretched camps where half a million mainly Rohingya refugees depend entirely on charities for survival.
The world body says food distribution in the vastly overcrowded settlements is still ad hoc and uncoordinated, more than a month after refugees began pouring into southern Bangladesh to escape ethnic bloodshed in Myanmar.
Huge crowds descend on aid deliveries and soldiers need to herd starving people into bamboo pens where they squat cheek by jowl under the scorching sun for a meal.
Many go hungry as charities scramble to feed 500,000 mouths every day.
Save the Children’s emergency health unit director Dr Unni Krishnan told AFP children make up the bulk of new arrivals and are most vulnerable to the paucity of food, with 145,500 infants under five needing urgent intervention to stave off malnutrition.
“Lots of children are showing all the signs of hunger and malnutrition, which is an alarming prospect when they’ve just fled so much horror.”
In one case a five-year-old Rohingya boy was so emaciated that doctors could not insert a drip into his tiny arm, one of thousands of children facing life-threatening malnutrition in overstretched Bangladeshi refugee camps.
0 Comments