It’s the first time our team went to Dikwa, a town 90km from Maiduguri in Borno State, northeast Nigeria, to carry out a nutrition assessment on children under the age of 5 years. What we found was devastating. Due to limited medical and transport capacity, we could only evacuate 28 urgent cases of malnutrition yesterday.
Head Nurse Bright Mukhana at the Inpatient Therapeutic Feeding Center in Gwange explains what’s happening: “Malnutrition is so rampant in Maiduguri because of the crisis of the insurgents, Boko Haram. This has stopped people from cultivating crops, they haven’t been going to their farms for quite some time, this resulted in shortage of food and malnutrition kicked in as a result of food scarcity.
These patients that we are managing here are mainly coming from camps around Maiduguri. We have several IDP camps (internally displaced persons camps) that are in and around Maiduguri and these malutrition cases are coming from these camps. In the meantime, we also have roads that have opened in other towns that are outside Maiduguri like Dikwa, Bama, Monguno and we’ve started receiving patients from these areas because they can now be accessed and they can now be referred inside Maiduguri for care.”
The crisis in Nigeria: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/article/nigeria-massive-aid-effort-needed-borno-state
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