Doctors Without Borders warned today, Friday, that thousands of Sudanese refugee children and their families are suffering from a “worrying” state of acute malnutrition, calling for “emergency food aid.” Neighboring countries have received thousands of Sudanese refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. for refugee affairs.
Chad hosts about 900,000 Sudanese refugees, and more than eight thousand others arrived there in the first week of November alone. The flow of refugees has accelerated in recent weeks from the Sudanese Darfur region bordering eastern Chad, according to the United Nations.
In the Mechi camp, which houses 40,000 refugees, Doctors Without Borders recorded an “overall acute prevalence rate (of malnutrition) of 13.6% among children under the age of five,” it announced in a statement.
In August and September, MSF recorded severe acute malnutrition rates of 4.8 and 4.6 percent, “twice the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization.”
The organization confirmed that “Doctors Without Borders teams have cared for 14,000 children suffering from malnutrition in… various outpatient programs” since the beginning of the year, of whom “about three thousand… were transferred to the hospital in serious condition.”
“In practice, this means that children now find themselves in a worrying health condition,” the NGO added.
She noted that the United Nations World Food Program warned of “the risks of being forced to restrict or stop part of its activities due to lack of funding,” and urged the international community to “strengthen emergency food aid.”
So far, the military escalation has caused the death of more than 10,400 people, according to conservative estimates by the ACLED organization, and has also led to the displacement of more than 4.8 million people inside Sudan and 1.2 million to neighboring countries, according to the United Nations.
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