Multimedia
Audio
Video
Photo

War and Post-War Chaos Hastens Child Malnutrition in Baghdad

Anonyme, Wednesday, July 2, 2003 - 09:29

Lisa Ashkenaz Croke

How the children suffer invasion:

A recent UNICEF survey in Baghdad found that acute malnutrition rates for children under the age of five have skyrocketed from four percent last summer to 7.7 percent post-war.

"The combination of less water and worse quality has increased diarrhea morbidity quite substantially and that leads to increased malnutrition," UNICEF representative, Carel de Rooy, told Reuters News Service. "One can assume looking at all of this that the situation is worse than the pre-war one. Definitely, it is not better."

A 2002 UNICEF survey found that about half the children suffering from acute malnutrition died before their fifth birthday.

Rooy said diarrhea morbidity in southern Baghdad has also increased since 2002.

Health experts are concerned that this year's statistics are reflected throughout urban Iraq, where water is unreliable and raw sewage pours into densely populated areas.

While a decade of economic sanctions were largely blamed for Iraq's notoriously precarious health care system, the U.S.-led coalition has been slow to respond to devastated hospitals left unprotected and plundered by looters immediately after the war, vitally degrading Iraqis access to treatment.

The children who survived the invasion, are now more likely to be malnourished. Particularly beseiged by the effects of malnutrition, are the children under the age of five.
www.NewsFromTheFront.org


CMAQ: Vie associative


Quebec City collective: no longer exist.

Get involved !

 

Ceci est un média alternatif de publication ouverte. Le collectif CMAQ, qui gère la validation des contributions sur le Indymedia-Québec, n'endosse aucunement les propos et ne juge pas de la véracité des informations. Ce sont les commentaires des Internautes, comme vous, qui servent à évaluer la qualité de l'information. Nous avons néanmoins une Politique éditoriale , qui essentiellement demande que les contributions portent sur une question d'émancipation et ne proviennent pas de médias commerciaux.

This is an alternative media using open publishing. The CMAQ collective, who validates the posts submitted on the Indymedia-Quebec, does not endorse in any way the opinions and statements and does not judge if the information is correct or true. The quality of the information is evaluated by the comments from Internet surfers, like yourself. We nonetheless have an Editorial Policy , which essentially requires that posts be related to questions of emancipation and does not come from a commercial media.