DHAKA: One out of every four Rohingya refugees’ children is suffering from life-threatening malnutrition.
Life-threatening levels of malnutrition have risen dramatically among Rohingya refugee children who have arrived in Bangladesh fleeing from ethnic persecution in Myanmar.
More than 600,000 Rohingya (around half of them are children) have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state since late August during military operations that the United Nations has described as ethnic cleansing and the world’s most acute refugee crisis.
According to new World Food Programme (WFP) survey, there is a full 7.5 % prevalence of life-threatening severe acute malnutrition- double the rate since May 2017 among Rohingya child at refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district.
The findings were based on a nutrition assessment conducted on 22-28 October of children under the age of five in 405 households in the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar.
Some 26,000 people now live in the Kutupalong camp, where they are faced with an acute shortage of food and water, unsanitary conditions and high rates of diarrhoea and respiratory infections.
“We knew already, before they left Myanmar, that the nutritional status of the population was poor, unfortunately this further deteriorated and continues to deteriorate,” Michael Dunford, Emergency Coordinator, WFP.
Malnutrition rates among children in northern Rakhine were already above emergency thresholds before the latest crisis erupted.
According to the WFP, in the state of Rakhine in Myanmar, the rates of malnutrition in the cities of Maungdaw and Buthidaung, where most of the refugees hail from, were already higher than the emergency threshold before the new wave of violence broke out on August 25.
With agencies inputs