Posted by Sadie from ? (160.129.27.22) on Tuesday, April 22, 2003 at 12:39PM :
"But experts with the World Health Organization (WHO) warn that deteriorating sanitation, water contamination, and increasing heat and humidity mean that there is an extremely high risk of an outbreak of diarrhoeal diseases. The hundreds of thousands of children in the city, many of whom are suffering from malnutrition, are particularly at risk."
& remember now that Iraq's vaccine supply is now gone, thanks to "looters".
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Nature 422, 459 (4 April 2003)
Aid workers fear impending disaster in Basra
QUIRIN SCHIERMEIER AND TOBIAS KRAMER
The siege of Basra seems to have caught out health officials working with international aid organizations. As Nature went to press, coalition forces had surrounded Iraq's second-largest city, and water supplies to around half of the 1.7-million population had been cut off for over a week. But aid agencies expected humanitarian problems to be concentrated in northern Iraq, and so lack the staff and equipment to contain any problems in Basra.
Iraqi officials say that there were no reports of cholera, typhoid or dysentery in the city last week. But experts with the World Health Organization (WHO) warn that deteriorating sanitation, water contamination, and increasing heat and humidity mean that there is an extremely high risk of an outbreak of diarrhoeal diseases. The hundreds of thousands of children in the city, many of whom are suffering from malnutrition, are particularly at risk.
"We are on the highest alert," says Ghulam Popal, head of the WHO's office in Baghdad, which coordinates the activities of the organization's 327 Iraqi medical staff.
The WHO has 15 emergency health kits — each containing basic needs for 10,000 people for three months — in place in Baghdad, and others are stored in northern Iraq. But the organization has no staff or kits in Basra, so the population there will have little or no access to the equipment, which includes antibiotics, dehydration solutions and water-purification tablets — all of which are vital to combat diarrhoeal diseases.
"You go where you think you'll be needed, and where it is reasonably safe for your own people," says Barry Sandland, a Brussels-based spokesman for Médecins Sans Frontières, a charity that has sent a team of six doctors to Baghdad. "But at the end it is just guesswork."
WHO officials believe that few people in Basra have access to public-health services. With the city's hospitals overloaded with wounded civilians, possible epidemics are likely to be a secondary consideration for the local health authorities, says Jim Tulloch, the WHO's regional health coordinator in Amman, Jordan.
A WHO rapid-response team in Baghdad is waiting for permits from the Iraqi authorities to travel to Basra, some 500 kilometres south of the Iraqi capital. The group will then have to decide if it is safe to make the journey. "We need immediate access to the city to assess the risk of an epidemic and, in the case of an outbreak, identify its cause and start medical treatment," says Popal.
Currently, the only international aid organization with access to Basra is the Red Cross, thanks to safety guarantees from the Iraqi army and the coalition forces. According to a Geneva-based spokesman, attempts to repair Basra's main water station are under way, but the water supply was still worryingly poor at the beginning of this week.
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Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2003 Registered No. 785998 England.
-- Sadie
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