Nigeria's flood survivors face long wait for medical aid

Bangkok Post Group

The worst floods in three decades to hit Nigeria's Borno state are stretching government and aid agency resources, causing long delays for medical aid amid warnings of waterborne disease. - REUTERS

Transcript

00:00In a camp for people displaced by floods in Nigeria's Borno state, Bintu Amadu is among

00:07hundreds of people who've been waiting for hours to see a doctor.

00:12Her son had diarrhoea.

00:16She says she's been waiting since yesterday to no avail.

00:23Overwhelmed aid agencies have warned of an outbreak of waterborne disease amid the region's

00:28worst flooding in three decades.

00:31Hundreds of thousands of people, like Amadu, have been forced into displacement camps

00:36without food and clean water.

00:39And that's stretching aid agency and government resources, exacerbating a critical humanitarian

00:46crisis.

00:47The demand is so massive, the needs are so massive.

00:49Mathias Homare, a field coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières, said that Borno residents

00:54were already struggling with malnutrition following years of a jihadist insurgency

00:59in the region.

01:01And that means their immunity was already suppressed.

01:05People are living out and about, they are exposed to the environment.

01:09So what do we see?

01:10A lot of waterborne diseases, diarrhoea, diarrhoeic diseases, you've got malaria, malaria is around

01:18with a lot of mosquitoes, people are not able to sleep on their mosquito nets.

01:23The floods, which have killed more than 30 people in Nigeria, started when a dam burst

01:28its walls.

01:30That's after heavy rainfall that has also caused floods in Cameroon, Chad, Mali and

01:35Niger.

01:36In the last two weeks of August, more than 1.5 million people were displaced across 12

01:42countries in Western Central Africa due to floods.

01:46That's according to the United Nations Humanitarian Office, which said around 465 people have

01:52been killed.

01:55Nigeria's government has separately warned of rising water levels in the country's largest

01:59rivers, which could cause floods in the oil-producing Niger Delta in the south.

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