MSF warning on malnourished children

The NGO, Medecins sans frontieres (MSF), on Friday said the number of severely malnourished children admitted to its therapeutic feeding centres in Karuzi province had doubled over the past four weeks and the situation was worsening daily. In a press release, it urged the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to improve the food supply pipelines to Burundi to enable a general food distribution to malnourished people in the north of the country. MSF said it was the only organisation running feeding programmes in Karuzi, targeting children, adolescents and lactating mothers, but it was rapidly approaching full capacity. “We are not solving the problem, simply postponing the inevitable,” MSF head of mission in Burundi Andrew Durrant told IRIN. “It is a vicious circle, we provide food and drugs in therapeutic and supplementary feeding centres, yet children leave our centres only to return one month later. Faced with the malaria epidemic, each time the children come back they are weaker.” MSF pointed out that malnutrition was not restricted to vulnerable populations, everyone was affected. The dry rations distributed in MSF supplementary feeding centres were taken home by the children and shared and eaten by the whole family in one day. “It is a sure indicator of the degree of intensity the crisis has now reached, I have never seen this before,” Karuzi-based MSF agency coordinator Laurence Sailly told IRIN. MSF said it was currently feeding 19,000 children and lactating mothers in 10 supplementary feeding centres and 1,100 children in four therapeutic feeding centres. A quarter of the children admitted came from neighbouring Ngozi province, the press statement said. “A lack of rain reduced last year’s harvest and the upcoming harvest in May/June will be insufficient to meet the population needs, unless seeds are distributed by mid-February,” the statement warned. It added that a serious malaria epidemic was continuing in northern Burundi, with 30,000 cases a week being treated in Karuzi province.