The Gaza Strip is facing a “perfect storm” of deadly diseases
The besieged residents of the Gaza Strip who have so far survived Israeli bombing and fire face a silent, invisible killer now stalking them: disease.
Ten doctors and relief workers told Reuters that the lack of food, clean water and shelter led to hundreds of thousands falling into shock, and there was no longer any escape from the spread of epidemics in the Strip with the collapse of the health system, according to Reuters news agency.
“The perfect storm of the disease has begun,” James Elder, spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said in an interview on Tuesday. Now the question is to what extent it will get worse.”
Data from the World Health Organization showed that from November 29 to December 10, the number of diarrhea cases in children under the age of five jumped 66 percent to reach 59,895 cases, and increased 55 percent among the remaining groups. population in the same period. The UN agency said that the numbers are inevitably incomplete given the collapse of all systems and services in Gaza due to the war.
Ahmed Al-Farra, head of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, told Reuters on Tuesday that the department was crowded with children suffering from severe dehydration, which leads to kidney failure in some cases, while the number of cases of acute diarrhea had worsened to four times the usual number.
He added that he was aware of 15 to 30 cases of hepatitis A in Khan Yunis during the past two weeks, and explained that “the incubation period of the virus ranges from three weeks to a month, so after a month there will be a jump in the number of hepatitis A cases.”
Since the collapse of the truce between Israel and Hamas on December 1, hundreds of thousands have moved into temporary shelters, such as abandoned buildings, schools and tents. Aid workers said many others were sleeping in the open without toilets or water to shower.
At the same time, 21 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip were closed, with 11 remaining partially operational and four operating slightly, according to World Health Organization figures as of December 10.
Mary Or Beirut, medical emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders’ operations in Gaza, said that the charitable medical organization left a health center in Khan Yunis ten days ago because the area was subject to Israeli evacuation orders, as it was treating cases of respiratory infections, diarrhea, and skin diseases.
She said that two things have now become inevitable: “The first is that a dysentery-like epidemic will spread throughout Gaza if we continue this pace of cases, and the other is that neither the Ministry of Health nor humanitarian organizations will be able to support confronting these epidemics.”
The practice of medicine is under attack
Academic researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warned in a report issued on November 6, a month after the Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war, of the extent to which the indirect health effects of the conflict will worsen over time.
They said that two months into the war, the burden of infant malnutrition due to lack of nutrition and care will increase, as will maternal malnutrition. They explained, “With the passage of time, the opportunity to introduce pathogens that may lead to the spread of epidemics increases. Risk factors include overcrowding and inadequate water and sanitation.
Aid workers say that what experts in London predicted is exactly what is happening now. Three experts said that diseases such as dysentery and watery diarrhea could ultimately lead to the death of as many children as Israeli bombing operations have killed so far.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said that two months of brutal war, coupled with a “very tight siege,” forced 1.3 million Gazans out of a population of 2.3 million to seek safety in the agency’s sites in the Strip overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
“Many of the shelters are overcrowded with those seeking safety, and can handle four or five times their capacity,” said Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications. “Most of the shelters are not equipped with toilets, showers, or clean water.”
She added that since the start of the war, 135 UNRWA employees have been killed and 70 percent of the employees have been displaced from their homes, and these are two reasons why UNRWA is now operating only nine of the 28 health clinics for primary services that it had before the war.
Tlaleng Mofokeng, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, said in a statement on December 7 that a total of at least 364 attacks on health care services had been recorded in Gaza since October 7.
“The practice of medicine is under attack,” she said.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza announced yesterday, Wednesday, that more than 300 of its employees and paramedics had been killed since October 7.
Epidemic environment
Salem Namur, a Syrian surgeon who treated the sick and injured in Eastern Ghouta outside the Syrian capital, Damascus, during a year-long siege imposed by the Syrian government, said that the pictures from Gaza reminded him of those scenes he experienced himself.
He added that diseases such as hepatitis and tuberculosis spread in Ghouta at that time due to the destruction of the drainage system and water pollution. Malnutrition also reduced the population’s immunity, and apart from wounds caused by bombing, the lack of antibiotics and vaccines for children stimulated the spread of diseases.
Namur, who left Ghouta in 2018 and lives in Germany, said: “The siege… is a means that causes the collapse of society. It means hunger and a lack of medical supplies… There is no electricity or refrigeration, and therefore there is no way to preserve medicines or food and no heating.”
The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip said on Wednesday that its supplies of children’s vaccines had run out. Last night, strong winds and heavy rain caused worn-out tents in a camp for displaced people in Rafah to be uprooted and water flooded the ground, forcing the displaced to spend the night huddled in the cold and on the wet sand.
The United Nations is tracking cases of infection with about 14 diseases that have “the potential to become epidemics,” and its concern is at the sharply rising rates of infection with diseases including dysentery, diarrhea, and acute respiratory infections, according to a list that the United Nations is currently using to monitor the situation in the Gaza Strip and which Reuters viewed on Sunday. Tuesday.
Dr. Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Cairo, who works on the United Nations response team, said that a diarrhea outbreak could occur as soon as tomorrow unless many aid trucks are allowed in and water is provided. Clean.
He added that the United Nations intends to begin documenting rates of acute malnutrition among children in the Gaza Strip soon by measuring the circumference of the arm from the top of the middle, known as the “MUAC” test.
“When you have severe malnutrition, which is called wasting, people die from that, but then they are also much more susceptible to other diseases,” Spiegel said.
The United Nations World Food Program said on Monday that 83 percent of those displaced in the southern Gaza Strip do not have enough food.
Not suitable for human consumption
Aid workers say that hospitals and health centers need to be able to treat such a large number of people for these diseases to avoid epidemics, rather than treating only wounds from bombing and destruction, which are already beyond their capacity.
They added that drinking and bathing water must be available at minimum levels in accordance with the standards of humanitarian emergency situations, and that much larger quantities of food and medicine must enter the Gaza Strip and safe corridors must be provided for humanitarian aid convoys to deliver them.
During a truce in the war, about two hundred aid trucks entered the Strip daily, but the number has since decreased to one hundred, and the ongoing fierce fighting prevents any distribution of aid beyond Rafah.
Doctors at Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah told Reuters on Tuesday that they were dealing with a number exceeding their capacity, including hundreds of patients in need of treatment for infections and infectious diseases due to the deteriorating conditions in overcrowded shelters.
Dr. Jamal Al-Hams says: “There will be outbreaks of all infectious diseases in Rafah.”
Al-Farra, head of the pediatrics department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, said that the ongoing hostilities have made it impossible for many families to bring their sick children to receive timely medical care, which in any case cannot be provided adequately due to the lack of medicines.
He said: “The children (drink) water that is not fit for human consumption… There are no fruits or vegetables, and therefore the children have a deficiency in vitamins in addition to… anemia from malnutrition.”
Doctors and relief workers say that infants are also suffering from hunger in the absence of clean water to mix infant formula with. Even relatively well-off residents of the Gaza Strip who work for international agencies or media companies say that their children are currently sick and ill and do not have enough food and water.
Mahmoud Abu Sharkh, standing in the middle of a sea of tents near Nasser Hospital after fleeing the northern Gaza Strip at the beginning of the war with his three children, all under the age of three, pointed to the deteriorating conditions around him in the dusty camp.
He said: “The children improve for two days, then on the third day they get sick again.”
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2023-12-14 11:39:00
