Source : NEW INDIAN EXPRESS NEWS
On top of not being able to find or afford the food that Mayar needs, her mother said chronic diarrhea linked to celiac disease has kept the child in and out of hospital all year. But it’s getting harder to help her as supplies like baby formula are disappearing, say health staff.
Hospitals are hanging by a thread, dealing with mass casualties from Israeli strikes. Packed hospital feeding centers are overwhelmed with patients.
“We have nothing at Nasser Hospital,” said Dr. Ahmed al-Farrah, who said his emergency center for malnourished children is at full capacity. Supplies are running out, people are living off scraps, and the situation is catastrophic for babies and pregnant women, he said.
Everything watered down to make it last
In the feeding center of the hospital, malnourished mothers console their hungry children — some so frail their spines jut out of their skin, their legs swollen from lack food.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises, has warned that there could be some 71,000 cases of malnourished children between now and March. In addition, nearly 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women will need treatment for acute malnutrition in the coming months.
Mai Namleh and her 18-month-old son, who live in a tent, are both malnourished. She wanted to wean him off of breastmilk because she barely has any, but she has so little else to give him.
She gives him heavily watered-down formula to ration it, and sometimes offers him starch to quiet his hunger screams. “I try to pass it for milk to stop him screaming,” she said of the formula.
An aid group gave her around 30 packets of nutritional supplements, but they ran out in two days as she shared them with family and friends, she said.
In another tent, Nouf al-Arja says she paid a fortune for a hard-to-find kilogram (about 2 pounds) of red lentils. The family cooks it with a lot of water so it lasts, unsure what they will eat next. The mother of four has lost 23 kilograms (50 pounds) and struggles to focus, saying she constantly feels dizzy.
Both she and her 3-year-old daughter are malnourished, doctors said. She’s worried her baby boy, born four months earlier and massively underweight, will suffer the same fate as she struggles to breastfeed.
“I keep looking for (infant food) …. so I can feed him. There is nothing,” she said.
SOURCE :- NEW INDIAN EXPRESS
