WHO representative leads official return

The United Nations' World Health Organisation (WHO) officially returned to Aghanistan on Thursday, although it will take a month or so for all of its international staff to return to the country. Although local staff continued much of the agency's work through the crisis period that followed, UN international staff left the country for security reasons on 12 September 2001, following the previous day's terrorist attacks on the United States. "Dr Said Salah, World Health representative for Afghanistan, is moving today for Kabul, and the remaining 21 international staff will be joining him over the course of the next month," WHO official Fadela Chaib told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Thursday. "We are working for Afghanistan and we should be there," she said. In addition to its international staff, WHO has 177 Afghan staff members, who have been continuing the agency's work in their country for much of the past three and a half months. WHO said it was resuming its routine activities, such as coordinating health activities and supplying health facilities with drugs and equipment, in Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold and the second-largest city in Afghanistan. "The situation in general is quiet and morale is very high, according to our staff there," Chaib said at a press conference on Wednesday. WHO noted that there was a shortage of health workers in Kandahar, with most doctors having left the city. Chaib said the health situation there was of great concern because hospitals and health facilities in the southern region were in dire need of medical supplies and equipment. There was also a need for short-term training of health workers, she added. Einar Holtet, spokesman for the Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, told reporters at the same press conference that malnutrition in northwestern Afghanistan had reached alarming levels. "Records from a children's nutritional programme in Qades, a district of Badghis Province, showed that about 50 percent of the children were suffering from severe malnutrition," he said. A feeding programme planned for Badghis, as well as the western provinces of Herat, Farah and Ghowr, will aim at achieving rapid nutritional improvements by providing sugar and oil to all pregnant and lactating mothers, as well as children under five years, he added. Several NGOs had warned that there was now an urgent need to diversify food supplies in remote areas of the northwest, where supplies were insufficient and families had no means of obtaining food, according to Holtet. Pulses, oil and corn/soya blend were needed for giving malnourished individuals a minimum intake of proteins, fat and vitamins, he added.