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Feature story:
Disease threatens lives of flood victims
By Ruth Ayisi
Six-year-old Rahel could no longer stand upright. As her spindly legs gave
way, she flopped down on the dusty ground, doubled over and vomited a watery
liquid.
Her mother, Florentina Uzebe, knelt down and covered the
vomit up with sand and then put her arm around her daughter, who was now sobbing
softly.
Rahel is one of the 3,214 people with malaria at a camp in Chaqualane, in
the southern province of Gaza, where around 40,000 displaced Mozambicans have
congregated, escaping from the country's worst floods in living memory.
Ten days after the Limpopo and Save Rivers and surrounding dams burst their
banks sending a gush of water raging through much of the countryside in the
southern provinces of Maputo, Gaza and Inhambane, the survivors are battling
against the threat of disease.
Their bodies are weak after hours or even days perched on the top of trees
and roofs with no water or food. Others escaped by walking for hours, like
Florentina.
With her young baby strapped on her back, and sometimes carrying Rahel, Florentina
waded about seven kilometres in dirty waters that sometimes reached as high
as her shoulders. "This is the second time I fled for my life and have lost
all my possessions, " said the 28-year-old mother. "First it was the war and
now the waters."
Today, almost a million people need humanitarian assistance, including 190,000
children under five years old. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people drowned.
As the muddy floodwater subsides, stagnant water will remain a breeding paradise
for the mosquito larvae.
"Malaria cases have doubled," says Claudio Marra, a doctor working for UNICEF
in Gaza province. "But what we're seeing now in the camps is just the tip
of the iceberg. Many of the children are dying at home."
UNICEF is working with the Government to make sure that drugs are available
in all camps, villages and towns to treat malaria. The difficulty has been
that much of the malaria is chloroquine resistant; and so the government has
agreed that in this emergency, a different drug, Fansidar, be used as the
first-line treatment for malaria.
For children living in the flood ravaged Limpopo River valley, and the impact
of malaria on their fragile bodies is compounded by many of the children being
malnourished and suffering from severe anaemia.
Even before the floods, malaria was the number one child killer in the country.
Besides malaria, everywhere is now a high risk for a cholera outbreak. Other
major threats are measles, meningitis and dysentery. Respiratory infections,
skin diseases, conjunctivitis and diarrhoea are already a problem in the camps.
As an important preventive measure, UNICEF will support a Government vaccination
campaign next week in all the camps and towns against measles and meningitis
for children and neonatal tetanus for pregnant women. The cold chain system
of refrigerators and cold boxes to keep the vaccines at the correct temperature
is now being put into place, and the vaccination teams will travel by road
and helicopter to ensure they reach all children and pregnant women.
Providing safe water has been a priority to prevent diarrhoeal diseases,
also a major killer of children. "Just a few days ago many of the flood victims
were drinking the muddy waters," says Dr. Marra.
This battle against disease is not easy in Mozambique, one of the world's
poorest countries, where about 245 children out of every 1,000 die due to
preventable diseases before they celebrate their fifth birthday.
Rahel is unfortunately typical of thousands of other children who survived
the floods. Her body has been dramatically weakened by lack of food, exhaustion
and her poor current living conditions.
Last night, despite heavy downpours of rain, like the tens of thousands of
other displaced people, the child slept with her mother and baby sister, Citeria,
outside under a tree. "We got very wet," said the mother in the local language
Shangaan. " Rahel is now very feverish." The girl's head was burning hot.
But at least Florentina has been able to take her children to see a health
worker, who was working tirelessly in a tent, set up temporarily as a makeshift
health post. In the past week, the few health workers in the Chaquelane camp
had seen over 5100 patients, most of them young children.
After a four-hour wait with hundreds of other sick people sitting on the
ground, Florentina and her children were attended to. Around her, masses of
people were coughing, children crying and others lying down, exhausted and
weak.
Florentina has no plans to return home at the moment. "I am too afraid that
the floods will come again,'' she said. Besides she does not know whether
anything of her house is left.
For now Florentina's priority is to nurse her two children back to health,
even if she has to do that outside under the branches of a tree. As she walked
away from the crowded health post, a swirl of dust engulfed her and dark clouds
gathered overhead threatening another very wet night.
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