100,000 need urgent humanitarian assistance - UN

More than 100,000 people in southwestern Somalia's Gedo district are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Tuesday.

Some 59,000 people faced a livelihood crisis, OCHA spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs told reporters in Geneva, Switzerland. Another 53,000 were in a “humanitarian emergency”. In a UN News Service report, Byrs said that in the lower Juba region in southern Somalia, which recently flooded, 10 to 15 cases of severe malnutrition and 20 to 30 cases of moderate malnutrition were being admitted each week to local health facilities run by Médecins sans Frontières Holland.

OCHA reported that a UN appeal for US $162 million in aid to the war-scarred Horn of Africa country had yielded only $71 million, less than half the amount needed.

The agency warned that about 1 million people across Somalia - including 400,000 internally displaced persons - urgently needed assistance.

Meanwhile, a new nationwide campaign to stem the spread of polio in Somalia will start in the capital, Mogadishu, on Thursday, an official of the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said, adding that there had been confirmed cases in the city.

"We have already confirmed two cases, and 20 other [suspected cases] are under investigation," said Faten Kamel, a regional medical officer for the WHO.

She explained that immunisation teams would move from house to house vaccinating all children under age five. She appealed to parents, health professionals, community leaders and members of civil society organisations to support the campaign, which would be launched in the rest of the country on 28 September.

Somalia had been polio-free since October 2002, but there has been growing concern that polio outbreaks in neighbouring Ethiopia and Yemen would spread.

Although five national immunisation campaigns were conducted in Somalia this year - most recently in June, July and August - to prevent the risk of a large-scale epidemic, insecurity in the country and low routine vaccination rates could still result in the rapid spread of the virus.

Six countries - Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan - remain polio-endemic, and the virus has continued to spread to previously polio-free countries. In total, 10 previously polio-free countries - Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mali, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen - had been re-infected in late 2004 and 2005.