Just under a quarter of a million children in Nigeria’s
northeastern state of Borno, where an insurgency waged by jihadists Boko Haram
has disrupted trade and healthcare, suffer from life-threatening
malnourishment, UNICEF said on Tuesday. The UN children’s agency said the
extent of the nutrition problems faced by children in Borno had become clearer
as a result of more areas in the northeast becoming accessible to humanitarian
assistance. UNICEF said that out of the 244,000 children suffering from severe
acute malnutrition in Borno this year, around one in five will die if they do
not receive treatment.
“Some 134 children on average will die every day from causes
linked to acute malnutrition if the response is not scaled up quickly,” Manuel
Fontaine, Unicef’s regional director for Western and Central African warned. “There
are two million people we are still not able to reach in Borno state, which
means that the true scope of this crisis has yet to be revealed to the world.”
The Islamist group Boko Haram’s seven-year rebellion has
left 20,000 people dead and more than two million displaced.
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