The study says Iraq’s malnutrition rate is far higher than in Uganda and Haiti

CAIRO, November 21 (IslamOnline.net) – Iraqi children are paying the silent cost of the US-led occupation with malnutrition rates exceeding by far those in the world’s poorest and disease-plagued countries, a leading US newspaper reported on Sunday, November 21.

Acute malnutrition among Iraqi children has nearly doubled since the US invaded the country 20 months ago, The Washington Post reported, citing a study by Iraq's health ministry in tandem with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the UN Development Program (UNDP).

“After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year,” concluded the study.

“Iraq's child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than rates in Uganda and Haiti.”

The study further put at some 400,000 the number of Iraqi children suffering from “wasting”, a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

The United Nations children's fund (UNICEF) had warned that the number of children who suffer from diarrhea, Iraq's number one killer of infants, has more than doubled under occupation.

Iraqi doctors attributed the increase in malnutrition to dirty water, unreliable supplies of the electricity needed to make it safe by boiling and a crippled economy.

The study said 60 percent of rural residents and 20 percent of urban dwellers have access only to contaminated water.

“I've heard of typhoid cases,” Zina Yahya, a nurse in a Baghdad maternity hospital, told the Post.

“Even myself, I suffer from the quality of water.”

“They tell me I have anemia,” added pregnant Yusra Jabbar, noting that doctors said almost all the pregnant women in the hospital do.

The World Health Organization (WHO) expected in May 2003 a cholera epidemic in southern Iraq, and warned that other infectious waterborne diseases could break out.

Disillusionment

Iraqi children are led over bricks from their home, following a raid on Fallujah

There is, in effect, increasing disillusionment with the US and its “liberation” rhetoric after health care conditions and unemployment rates hit all-time low.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research group, said health care was worsening at the quickest pace.

Deteriorating basic services take lives that many Iraqis said they had expected to improve under American stewardship.

“These figures clearly indicate the downward trend,” Alexander Malyavin, a child health specialist with the UNICEF mission to Iraq, told the American daily.

Kasim Said, a day laborer, was at Baghdad's main children's hospital to visit his ailing year-old son Abdullah, who weighs just 11 pounds.

“Things have been worse for me since the war,” he said.

“During the previous regime, I used to work on the government projects. Now there are no projects,” said the father.

The Post said after the 1991 Persian Gulf War left much of the capital a shambles, Saddam Hussein's government restored electricity and kerosene supplies in only two months.

“Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen” with the fall of Saddam, said an administrator at Baghdad's Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics.

“So we're surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice.”