Drug stocks dwindling in east

Displaced residents of eastern Uganda’s Teso region - recently a target of rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) attacks - are at risk of dying from easily treatable diseases if efforts are not made to tackle the region’s drug shortage, medical officers said on Monday. Doctors in the town of Soroti - around which most of the region's internally displaced persons (IDPs) are camped - said that as of this week, they had no further stocks of treatments for potentially lethal diseases like malaria. “On Friday, we more or less completely ran out of drugs,” Dr Nicholas Okwana, district director of health services in Soroti, told IRIN. “And now we are really worried. We had some emergency provisions from the ministry of health and some donors. Those are now completely dry.” Okwana said health officials in Soroti were launching an appeal for urgent assistance to help the district restock its medical supplies. “We have a meeting scheduled for today to discuss how to launch this appeal. It goes out to anyone who think they can help us in any way,” he said. “Malaria is the number one problem and we urgently need quinine. But there is also diarrhoea and we are starting to get cases of severe dysentery now,” he told IRIN. Eye and kidney infections were also commonplace, he added. The number of IDPs camped around Soroti was estimated by Ugandan health officials to be around 120,000. But Okwana said that figure was likely to have changed over the weekend with renewed LRA attacks on Soroti town forcing more civilians to flee their homes. On Sunday, the LRA attacked the Otuopi suburb of Soroti, killing an unknown number of civilians and abducting around a dozen people, according to eye witnesses. “The fatality rate is not yet high. We are losing children here and there. But we fear an epidemic that we will be in no position to deal with,” Okwana warned. Okwana said that sanitary conditions in the camps were also deteriorating owing to the influx of new IPDs and poor access to water.