CHAD-SUDAN: Dirty water, not food shortage, blamed for malnutrition among refugees

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

DAKAR, 14 Jul 2004 (IRIN) - More than a quarter of the Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad suffer from acute malnutrition, but lack of access to clean drinking water rather than a shortage of food is the main cause of this alarming situation, according to a survey conducted last month by the United Nations and other relief agencies operating in the area.

The survey, a draft copy of which was made available to IRIN, linked the rate of high malnutrition detected to rampant diarrhoea.

It blamed the diarrhoea, in turn, on poor water supplies in the semi-arid region which lies on the southern edge of the Sahara desert.

"Incidental prolonged cases of diarrhoea could cause and exacerbate the malnutrition," the survey team said in its draft report.

The underlying causes of diarrhoea likely relate to lack of access to and availability of clean water," it added.

The survey, conducted in June, covered 896 children aged between six months and five years living in three official refugee camps near the border town of Tine and in spontaneous refugee settlements nearby.

It detected a global acute malnutrition rate of 27.0 percent within the refugee camps and 29.2 percent among refugees living outside them.

The survey team also sampled the health of 175 Chadian infants living in 11 villages in the same area. It found the local farming population to be in as poor a state of health as the refugees they were hosting, with an acute malnutrition rate of 24.0 percent.

Three hours per trip to fetch water

Most of those questioned said they relied on traditional wells a long way from their homes which were often crowded with other people waiting to draw water.

The survey team found that even refugees living in official camps organised by the UN refugee agency UNHCR took an average of three hours to fetch water every time they went to replenish their supply.

In the refugee camps, 59 percent of children had suffered diarrhoea during the two weeks prior to the survey. The rate fell to 43.5 percent among refugees outside the camps and 46 percent among the local Chadian population.

"The main cause of malnutrition in the camps is not really lack of food, but the availability and accessibility of clean water," Philippe Guyon Le Bouffi, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Chad told IRIN by telephone from N'djamena.

He said the WFP had sufficient food stocks in place in eastern Chad to feed 180,000 refugees till the end of August.

A further 8,000 tonnes of food was expected to arrive soon from Cameroon in time for distribution in September, he added.

People are defined as suffering from global acute malnutrition when their weight for height ratio falls to less than 80 percent of the median for a healthy population.

The survey showed that three per cent of refugee children and Chadian infants living in frontier settlements suffered from severe acute malnutrition because their height for weight ratio had fallen to less than 70 percent of normal.

The situation was a little better inside the refugee camps, where a rate of only 1.7 percent was recorded.

Special feeding centres for children are needed

"Global malnutrition, when it passes 10%, becomes a public health problem. In our case, the situation is three fold that number, which shows how serious the situation is," Jean Laokole, the Director of the Chadian National Centre for Nutrition and Technology, who took part in the survey, told IRIN.

[ENDS]