By Peter Heinlein, Voice of America
Shashemene, Ethiopia – Humanitarian agencies are rushing emergency aid to drought-stricken central Ethiopia, where a sudden deterioration in food supplies has led to surge of child mortality. At least 23 children have died at hospitals and emergency feeding centers during the past three weeks, and authorities say countless others have died at home for lack of treatment. In this first of two reports from the hardest-hit area around the town of Shashemene 250 kilometers south of Addis Ababa, VOA’s Peter Heinlein reports conditions are expected to worsen over the coming months.
It is bedlam inside a tent on the grounds of the Shashemene hospital. Thirty severely malnourished children, their mothers, and assorted other siblings are scattered over the bare ground, with nothing to do but wait for the next feeding.
Three-year-old Chemeni is a tiny wisp of bony flesh with black eyes wide as saucers. Her mother, Buqre Hussein softly strokes Chemeni’s face, a younger daughter strapped to her back. She says her children are among the fortunate ones.
“I am glad my children are recovering,’ she said. ‘And I expect they will recover. I am glad to see this.”
Every four hours, each child in the tent receives a red cup filled with a high-nutrition supplement known as F-75. But Shashemene’s regional health officer, Dr. Abebe Megerso says many more malnourished children are having to be turned away.
“The supply is not enough because we did not know the problem is this much overwhelming,’said Megerso. ‘And now as the people with problem are appearing, the supply we have at hand is becoming short, and even now, we do not have F-100 and F-75, particularly F-75 is very scarce now.”
This makeshift therapeutic feeding center was erected nearly three weeks ago when health officials realized they had an emergency on their hands.
Dr. Megerso says regional health officials tried to prepare for the effects of the drought, but could not imagine the shortages, and the flood of malnourished children, would be this bad.
“It is unusual,’ he said ‘We have never had problem before because this zone is known by surplus production. We are simply admitting the severely malnourished ones, and we are referring the children with high complications to hospital. But we cannot refer all of them to hospital because we can create high overcrowding in hospital and we are not well prepared.”
Ethiopian officials last month issued an international appeal for enough emergency food aid for two-point-two million people. But U.N. agencies say at least three-point-four-million people, and possibly many more, are already severely affected by the drought.
Viviane Van Steirteghem, deputy country director for the U.N. Children’s Agency, UNICEF, says tens of thousands of children are in danger of starvation.
“We estimate now, and this is a best estimate, that 126,000 children over the country are in immediate need of this therapeutic care to avoid mortality,’ said Viviane Van Steirteghem.
The United States provides the bulk of the food aid to Ethiopia. The U.S. Congress approved an additional $100 million of aid this month, boosting the total for the year to more than $300 million.
But the U.N. World Food Program estimates 395,000 metric tons of food will be needed to get through the immediate crisis. That will cost $147 million more than is currently available.
The WFP’s Lisette Trebbi says the way conditions are deteriorating, the month of June is going to be especially difficult.
“We have new donations coming in, but it is a question of timing,’ said Lisette Trebbi. ‘And we therefore foresee we will have some shortfalls… during the month of June, which will be a critical month, for the population, because they will still not have recovered, we anticipate the crisis to get worse, so we are taking every measure that we can, we are short and will probably have to prioritize the worst and most affected area.”
There has been some rain in central Ethiopia in recent weeks; not enough to produce the desperately needed bumper harvest in September, but enough to spark fears of an outbreak of water-borne diseases among a weak and vulnerable population.
Officials here are predicting many difficult months ahead.
3 thoughts on “23 children died from hunger in Shashemene”
The “miraculous” economic policy coupled up with, self sustenance and “self reliance” in food supply, as stipulated by an economist turned drop-out of medical school, Meles Naziawi, seem to show an effect. After all he and his cahoots have long history of administering a failed region like Tigray before coming to the blessed land where one harvest eggs from earth (a reference of Agazee to potato when they first saw it in 1991). What matters is experience; now there would be many southermn regions that would look like Tigray of 1980s, thanks to the TPLF mafia!
Food prices sky-rocketing. Children are dying of starvation. Yet, in TPLF economics, agricultural sector is growing in double digits. And the agricultural sector that grows in “double digits” is account for 80% of Ethiopia’s production. This argument of TPLF alone proves how super liars TPLF people are.
Drought returns to haunt Ethiopia
By Barry Malone
Mon May 19, 6:21 AM ET
Ethiopian mother Ayantu Tamon has lost a child to hunger every year for the last four and now cradles her severely malnourished and weakened three-year-old son Hirbu in her arms.
“I just hope God lets him live,” she says. “I have only two children left.”
Hirbu is being fed by drip at Rophi Catholic Church in Siraro, a remote farming area 350 km (220 miles) south of the capital Addis Ababa.
He is one of 233 children who have been brought starving to the small Sisters of Mercy church in just the last three weeks.
The U.N. Children’s Agency UNICEF says a recent drought in Ethiopia has caused a food crisis and estimates 126,000 children are suffering from severe malnutrition.
But the government and aid agencies are struggling to find money to help, with international food prices rising sharply.
UNICEF says 6 million Ethiopian children under the age of five may be at risk of malnutrition.
And the U.N. World Food Programme estimates 3.4 million of Ethiopia’s more than 80 million people will need food relief from July to September.
“The great tragedy is that Ethiopia had been making some impressive improvements before this drought,” said Viviane Van Steirteghem, UNICEF deputy representative in the country.
Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous nation, had been cited as an example to other African countries after reducing its infant mortality rate to 123 deaths from every 1,000 births from 166 in just five years.
“UNFORTUNATE CHAIN”
Innovative schemes to reduce the impact of drought and train local people as health workers were also introduced and much praised internationally.
“It’s a chain of unfortunate events that has led to this,” says Lisetta Trebbi, Head of Relief the United Nation’s World Food Programme in Ethiopia.
“We have drought — a really poor rainy season — and, of course, we have high food prices worldwide.”
The global rise in food prices has hit the WFP hard.
The organization now needs to raise $147 million to tackle Ethiopia’s needs. Aid workers say the money isn’t coming in time, with donors concentrating on disaster-hit China and Myanmar.
At Rophi Catholic Church, mothers hold their sick children in their laps, sitting on dirty sheets sweltering in the heat inside makeshift tents. “It’s not like the normal sound of children crying,” said one nun. “It’s desperate.”
The Sisters of Mercy and the local government were caring for the children who started arriving at the rate of about 20 a day to a height of 74 last Friday alone.
“There are more people out there who would normally depend on a harvest in July,” Trebbi said.
“But, because of the drought, they will not now get that harvest and their food reserves will be gone. This situation is deteriorating very rapidly.”
(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/ )
(Editing by Bryson Hull)
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