Nearly 1,500 people died of malnutrition in just part of Ethiopia’s blockaded Tigray region over a four-month period last year, including more than 350 young children, a new report by the region’s health bureau says. It cites more than 5,000 blockade-related deaths in all from hunger and disease in the largest official death toll yet associated with the country’s war. Severe acute malnutrition in children under 5, at less than 2% in Tigray before the war, was now above 7%, he said. The assessment found at least 369 children under 5 had died of malnutrition, part of 1,479 people in all.
“Deaths are alarmingly increasing,” including from easily preventable diseases like rabies as medicines run out or expire, the head of Tigray’s health bureau, Hagos Godefay, told The Associated Press late last year as the findings were being compiled. “This is one of the worst times of my life, I can tell you.”
His report on the findings, published Wednesday by the independent Ethiopia Insight, says 5,421 deaths were confirmed in Tigray between July and October in an assessment by his bureau and some international aid groups.
The deaths were overwhelmingly from malnutrition, infectious disease and noncommunicable diseases. The deaths do not reflect people killed in combat.
Report: 5,000-plus deaths under Ethiopia's Tigray blockade | AP News
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