Almost 40.000 people have received either therapeutic or enriched food through MSF nutrition activities in the South of Ethiopia over the last four months. Crowds still throng at the entrance of the nutrition centres to try to get something to eat.
24.000 people suffering from severe acute malnutrition have been admitted to MSF programmes in the Oromiya and Southern Nations and Nationalities People's (SNNP) regions in the South of Ethiopia. The patients are mostly young children but the proportion of older children or even adults is still significant in some areas. On average, two out of ten patients are over 5 years old. MSF is constantly adapting its nutritional activities by opening new programs where needed, like recently in Duna, Sidama or Gedeo districts, and closing some nutrition centres after a drop in the number of patients.
In some places, people have begun to eat early maize taken directly from their field, in others they will still have to wait one or two months. MSF has also opened a nutritional program in Teru, to the north-west of the Ethiopian capital, Addis-Abbeba, in the Afar region, where the hunger gap has not even begun and 9 percent of the children under five are severely malnourished. A total of more than 60 MSF nutrition centres provide medical care and deliver therapeutic food to severely malnourished patients. Several of these centres have hospitalisation capacities for the patients suffering from medical complications associated with malnutrition. The majority of the patients improve in a few weeks by taking the therapeutic food and the medication they need at home and receiving a weekly follow-up in the nutrition centre.
3.000 tons of food.
"When we began the intervention in mid-May, we were opening more and more nutrition centres as quickly as we could and severely malnourished children were coming in huge numbers. Over the past month, the pressure on MSF activities for the treatment of severe malnutrition has been slowly declining in most places", explains Renzo Fricke, emergency coordinator of MSF nutritional activities in the South of Ethiopia.
"For the children who were the most in danger, the treatment has been effective; for the others, the beginning of the activities for moderately malnourished children has limited the occurrence of new severe cases". The teams in 26 of the nutrition centres also admit moderately malnourished children. 2.500 tons of enriched flour, more than 200 tons of oil and more than 300 tons of other food (lentils, maize, sugar) have been sent to the field and are being distributed directly to the beneficiaries by MSF teams. This supply of food has generated a huge hope among the population as a much larger proportion of people have a chance to get admitted onto MSF's programmes. In some areas, a third of the children under five are moderately malnourished.
Crowds pushing at the door.
In Tunto, in the SNNP region, what the team considers as a "quiet day" is when fewer than a thousand people are struggling at the entrance to be sure to get in. Some days, two thousand or so people have come and the team have had no choice but to stop the activities to avoid an accident in the crowd. Each MSF team is trying new strategies for better crowd control and for limiting the screening workload. Some people just continue to come day after day, still hoping that they will fit in the criteria and get some food. Just as evident to the doctors and nurses in the nutrition centres as the lack of access to food, is the lack of access to healthcare. People can neither afford the price of the food nor the price of the medicines. Children are prone to worms and diarrhoea and lots of malnourished adults also have chronic disease.
Bogalesh, one among thousands.
A few dozen kilometres from Tunto, in Mudulla, the queue of people stretches hundreds of meters in front of the nutrition centre. Here, activities for moderately malnourished children are only just starting and the number of severely malnourished patients remains high. In this area, a quarter of the patients are children between 5 and 14 years old and 12 percent are adults. Bogalesh is coming for the first time. A neighbour told her that she should go because she could get food here. She waited until she could move, she's suffering from arthritis.
Bogalesh stands 149cm tall and weighs just 30 kg; according to the nutrition criteria, she will have to put on 10 kg before being considered as cured. And every week while she's in the programme, she will receive 5 kg of flour, 1 litre of oil and therapeutic food to eat twice a day. This mother of five children hasn't received any food or financial aid directly, but one of her neighbours got 50 kg of flour in an emergency aid distribution and gave her 3 glasses of it a few days ago. As little as it was, this aid was most welcome, as the value of this in the local market is more than what a man can earn with a day of work in a farm (5 birrhs or 50 cents).
