Almost 40 percent malnutrition found

Results from an MSF-Spain survey in the Mandera area of northeastern province in May showed a global acute malnutrition rate of 39.2 percent, up from 21 percent in January, USAID’s Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) reported recently. This rate is close to that reported during the severe drought in 1996/97, the FEWS report said. MSF on Sunday re-opened its therapeutic feeding centre in Mandera town and is distributing UNIMIX once a week to surrounding villages. “We are trying to save children’s lives. Some of them are very, very thin and some are sick,” MSF’s Country Coordinator Johan De Smedt told IRIN on Wednesday. “We are trying to get the rate down to 20-22 percent, which is normal in Mandera,” he said. Many very vulnerable people with no proper income source have moved to Mandera town from surrounding villages, he added. Meanwhile, WFP on Tuesday warned that below average rainfall in May and June in Kenya had put food availability at risk in pastoral districts, drought-prone areas (particularly in the north-east) and some key grain-producing areas of the Rift Valley. “The pastoralists who have only received meagre rainfall this year will be worst affected”, WFP’s Robin Wheeler said in a statement received by IRIN.