Saturday, July 15, 2017

Bomb Their Health Facilities, They'll Die on Their Own

“The water is contaminated and I don’t drink it. We have tanks, but we don’t get water regularly. The situation cannot be worse. [...] Everybody is sick and in rough shape, and their poor financial condition does not enable them to move from one health centre to another."

[...]

The Abs district was the scene of a deadly airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition last August that demolished a hospital supported by MSF, killing 19 people, including one of the aid agency’s staff members, and injuring 24.

[...]

“During [the war] almost all health facilities and healthcare services reached a point of thorough collapse and thus are unable to respond to the increasing need to address fatal diseases and civilian victims. Many hospitals [have] shut down and many others were hit either by air or ground strikes, occupied by militias or used as military barracks,” he said. “Most [people] cannot afford even the transportation from their countryside areas or displacements communities to the nearest medical centres to treat them for cholera,” he added.

[...]

The district hosts more internally displaced people than anywhere else in the country but most health facilities are not functioning; there is a lack of staff and medical supplies are running short.

“When a plane flies overhead, many patients and staff feel that fear, that vulnerability. For seconds, everything stops,” he said, according to a testimony provided by MSF. “You see mothers disconnecting their children’s feeding tubes so they can run out of the hospital’s nutrition ward.”

[...]

Less than a year later, as the ongoing conflict hits an stalemate, creating the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, the MSF cholera treatment centre in Abs town alone is receiving more than 460 patients daily.

[...]

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned on Monday that the cholera epidemic in Yemen was spiralling out of control.

[...]

According to the World Health Organization, suspected cholera cases have been reported in 95.6% of Yemen governorates. [...] Only 45% of health facilities in Yemen remain with limited functionality, the UN has said.

[...]

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has led a US-backed military intervention in Yemen, aimed at reinstating [ ousted president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour] Hadi, who lives in exile in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and countering advances of Iran-backed Houthis.

  Guardian
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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