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In flooded Pakistan, a graver threat draws near
Associated Press - September 20, 2010
Margie Mason, Sukkur – Suhani Bunglani fans flies away from her two baby girls as one sleeps motionless while the other stares without blinking at the roof of their tent, her empty belly bulging beneath a green flowered shirt.
Their newborn sister already died inside this steamy shelter at just four days old, after the family's escape from floods that drowned a huge swath of Pakistan. Now the girls, ages 1 and 2, are slowly starving, with shriveled arms and legs.
More than 100,000 children left homeless by Pakistan's floods are in danger of dying because they simply do not have enough to eat, according to Unicef.
Children already weak from living on too little food in poor rural areas before the floods are fighting to stay alive, as diarrhea, respiratory diseases and malaria attack their emaciated bodies.
Doctors roaming the 38 degree Celsius camp that reeks of urine and animal manure have warned Bunglani three times to take her children to the hospital, or they will die.
The mother says she knows they need help, but she cannot leave the tent without her husband's consent. She must stay until he returns, even if it means risking her daughters' lives.
The floodwaters that began swamping a section of Pakistan larger than Florida six weeks ago continue to inundate new areas, forcing even more people to flee.
At least 18 million have already been affected, and nearly half of them are homeless. Many have been herded into crude, crowded camps or left to fend for themselves along roads.
But doctors warn that the real catastrophe is moving much slower than the murky water. About 105,000 kids younger than 5 are at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition over the next six months, Unicef estimates.
"You're seeing children who were probably very close to the brink of being malnourished, and the emergency has just pushed them over the edge," says Erin Boyd, a Unicef emergency nutritionist working in southern Pakistan.
"There's just not the capacity to treat this level of severe acute malnutrition."
The UN World Food Program alone has fed more than four million people since the crisis began, distributing monthly rations that include nutrition-packed foods for children. But the sheer geographic and human scale of the disaster is overwhelming.
Inside the government-run Railway Hospital in Sukkur, the aid group Doctors Without Borders has already turned a ward into an in-patient feeding center.
"You can have some serious, serious physical consequences on their health and very long term, and it can reach death," Sylvain Groulx, Doctors Without Borders project coordinator said.
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