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About 90 percent of the people in northern Rakhine state are
Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority that faces discrimination and
violence in mostly Buddhist Myanmar. The government does not
recognize them as citizens, and many Rohingya are excluded from
healthcare, education and employment.
Widespread floods across Myanmar six months ago - caused by
torrential rains and Cyclone Komen - destroyed crops, damaged rice
paddies and contaminated water sources, worsening food insecurity.
The number of severely malnourished children under the age of five
newly admitted to a European Commission-backed feeding program in
Maungdaw district shot up after the floods to more than 1,500 in
October, from 1,200 new admittances in August and 500 in July, a
regional official of an EU agency said.
"The frequency and diversity of foods they were eating had gone
down," the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO)'s regional
nutrition coordinator, Roselyn Mullo, said of her meetings with
beneficiaries in October.
"They had reduced meals from three meals to one meal a day, or they
were just eating one type of food. Some were relying just on rice
and water."
The real number of malnourished children is far higher than the
number in the feeding program, Mullo said, noting that new
admittances in October were only 38 percent of the 4,100 children
under five identified as suffering severe acute malnutrition.
An additional 19,200 children under five were moderately
malnourished, and these numbers may rise further this year.
As their situation is unlikely to change, "a similar caseload of
acutely malnourished children or even higher could be anticipated in
2016," Mullo said.
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Maungdaw is home to 712,300 people, including 137,000 children under
the age of five.
Children with severe acute malnutrition are very thin for their
height - "frail and skeletal" - require urgent treatment to survive,
and are nine times more likely to die than well-nourished children,
UNICEF says.
ECHO supports a 60-day feeding program that gives the children
weekly rations of high-calorie, high-nutrient food, and includes
weekly body measurements and medical treatment of underlying
infections.
In 2015, a total of about 14,000 children were admitted to the
feeding program, including 10,900 under the age of five.
(Reporting by Alisa Tang, editing by Tim Pearce. Please credit the
Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters,
that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and
climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org/)
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