Boomerang! Kwashiorkor epidemics spreads across Northern Nigeria

Boomerang! Kwashiorkor epidemics spreads across Northern Nigeria

Between 1967 and 1970, millions of Biafran children were deliberately starved by the Yakubu-Gowon-led junta. The northerners rejoiced as they saw innocent children dying of hunger. Today, Kwashiorkor epidemics is spreading across Northern Nigeria.

More than 1,200 people have died from starvation and illness at an aid camp in northeastern Nigeria that houses people fleeing the militant group, Boko Haram, named as the world’s most deadliest terrorist organisation, medical charity Medecins Sans Frontières said on Thursday, June 23, 2016.

MSF said its team found 24,000 people, including 15,000 children, sheltering in the camp located on a hospital compound during a visit to Bama last month — its first trip to the city since it was wrested from Boko Haram‘s control in March 2015.

A file photo a doctor treating to a malnourished child at a refugee camp in Yola, Nigeria in 2015. | AP Photo/Sunday Alamba

The city was part of an area around the size of Belgium that was held by Boko Haram for more than six months before being pushed out by the army.

MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said “a catastrophic humanitarian emergency is currently unfolding” at the camp, adding that around a fifth of 800 children who underwent medical screening were acutely malnourished and that almost 500 children had died.

“We have been told that people including children there have starved to death,” said Ghada Hatim, MSF head of mission in Nigeria. “We were told that on certain days more than 30 people have died due to hunger and illness.”

During its assessment, the Doctors Without Borders team counted 1,233 graves near the camp that had been dug in the past year. It said 480 of these graves belonged to children.

More than 15,000 people have been killed and 2 million displaced in Nigeria and neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon during Boko Haram‘s seven-year insurgency, in which the group has tried to create a state adhering to sharia, Islamic law.

Nigeria’s army, aided by troops from neighboring countries, has recaptured most of the territory that was lost to the group. But the jihadist group, which last year pledged loyalty to Islamic State, still regularly stages suicide bombings.

Boomerang! Kwashiorkor epidemics spreads across Northern Nigeria