80% of Yemen Children in Need of Immediate Aid: UN

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – A combination of war, cholera and hunger behind 80 percent of Yemeni children is in dire need of aid, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

“About 80 percent of Yemen’s children need immediate humanitarian assistance,” the executive directors of three UN agencies said in a joint statement issued at the end of a two-day visit.

Nearly 2 million children suffer from acute malnutrition. Malnutrition makes them more susceptible to cholera. The disease creates more malnutrition.

The country is also facing “the world’s worst outbreak of cholera in the midst of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis,” the agency said. The number of cases is expected to reach 600,000 by the end of the year.

The directors of the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Food Program (WFP) toured areas controlled by the Government and rebel-held areas during their visit.

They said they saw “children barely gathering strength to breathe” and vital infrastructure damaged or destroyed.

The United Nations said earlier this month that international donors had pledged $ 2.1 billion in aid at a conference earlier this year but only one-third had been disbursed.

This has forced relief agencies to reorient their limited resources to fight cholera, putting communities at greater risk of malnutrition.

The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have reported that a cholera outbreak has killed 1900 people since April, with 400,000 suspected cases across the country.

The heads of agencies said the improvement had improved because “more than 99 per cent of patients with suspected cholera who have access to health services are now alive.”

Since March 2015, Yemen has been under brutal aggression by the Saudi-led coalition. Tens of thousands of Yemenis have been wounded and wounded in Saudi-led attacks, the vast majority of them civilians.

The alliance also imposed a blockade on the country’s poor ports and airports as part of its aggression aimed at restoring power to former fugitive President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

The two-year war killed more than 10,000 people, injured 45,000 others and displaced more than 11 percent of the country’s 26 million people.

Source: Websites