KENYA: Severely malnourished children arrive daily at Wajir district hospital as drought persists

Record ID: 360656

  • Title: KENYA: Severely malnourished children arrive daily at Wajir district hospital as drought persists
  • Date: 16th July 2011
  • Summary: NURTA FARAH ON MOTHER'S LAP PULL FOCUS TO BED POST IN BACKGROUND
  • Embargoed: 31st July 2011 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Kenya, Kenya
  • Country: Kenya
  • Topics: Disasters,Environment,Health
  • Reuters ID: LVAF1R7THYQZE2P4VGFXTR6QDOMZ
  • Story Text: In Wajir District hospital's pediatric ward, half of the fifteen beds are taken up by malnourished children.
    One-year-old Said Abdikadir was bought in on Wednesday (July 13). His mother, Habiba Ibrahim says the little boy used to have lots of energy, he ran around their village with the other children until he started getting weaker because she has nothing to feed him. By the time they reached the hospital he was so weak he couldn't lift his head off his mother's heavily pregnant stomach.
    Doctors will try to boost his weight using a feeding tube to get it back to a safe level using special high protein food supplements and milk formula.
    After that he will be sent home again with his mother where the problems that caused his malnutrition are steadily getting worse.
    Severe drought has left hundreds of children without food and water. Their parents often away for days on end searching for grazing land for livestock are regularly forced to leave them behind with grandparents or neighbours.
    Without money to buy food or livestock to provide them with milk or meat, families survive on what they get in handouts from the government and aid agencies. But even that's not enough, and the rate of severely malnourished children is rapidly rising.
    "In the last few weeks we have seen an increase of children with severe malnutrition. Of these children most of them come with complications resulting from acute malnutrition. The children we have seen on the wards most of them are very sick and most of them come here with an inability to feed and we have to feed them with a naso-gastric tube," said Mohamed Hassan, one of the doctors treating patients on the ward.
    But the problem he says goes much further than the emergency treatment the children get in hospital.
    Most families from the area are pastoralists who rely on livestock as a means to survive. But successive years of failed rains has left the area dry as a desert leaving herders no way to maintain their herds.
    "We need to find an alternative source of livelihood for the people of this region and we also need to get more help from the government and other partners," said Hassan.
    Increasingly young men and women with children in the area have begun to abandon a pastoralist lifestyle and move to local towns to find work as casual labour. Known among the Somali community as pastoralist 'dropouts' they spend months away from home and are forced to leave children behind with grandparents or neighbours who are left trying to feed large families with very little.
    "This baby is crying because she is hungry. In previous droughts we used to be able to find something to but this time we have nothing. Our goats and camels have no milk or meat they have all died. That's the difference between this drought and the previous one," said Salata Kassim, with her emaciated granddaughter crying in her arms.
    18-month-old Nurta Farah has severe edema, a condition where the body swells up through lack of protein. She has been in the hospital for 20 days and while she has stopped vomiting, she is still very weak and the swelling has not gone down.
    Her mother Salatha Ahmed is eight months pregnant with her eighth child and worries about the rest of the children she has had to leave at home.
    "I sent food that my relatives bought to me here in the hospital back home to my other children. I have left them behind with very little, I have six children back at home but I don't even know how they are living now," she said.
    Close to 3.5 million people have been declared food insecure in Kenya by the international aid community. Emergency feeding programmes are being run by the Kenyan government with the help of the United Nations and other aid agencies but the need is still outstripping demand.
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