UNICEF: Millions of Yemeni Children at Risk of Diseases, Hunger
Local Editor
The United Nations children's agency UNICEF said on Tuesday that escalating violence in Yemen has devastated the country's health system and exposed millions of children to the threat of preventable diseases including measles, pneumonia and diarrhea.
UNICEF said that since fighting intensified in March, when Saudi air strikes began against Yemen, many hospitals and health centers have been unable to function properly and vaccination services have been disrupted.
Health centers lack the electricity and fuel needed to distribute vaccines and keep them cold, while the fear of conflict is deterring parents from taking their children to receive vaccinations, the UNICEF said.
A Saudi-led coalition backed by the United States has been carrying out aerial attacks on Yemen for almost three months since March-without a UN mandate.
The death toll has soared since the fighting escalated in March. At least 279 children have been killed and 402 injured since March - four times the number reported in the whole of 2014, UNICEF said.
"Around 280 children have been killed directly in the conflict - that is very tragic in its own right," UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa Peter Salama told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Salama said by phone from Amman in Jordan, "But what is even more tragic is that hundreds of thousands more children might die if the conflict continues, and they will be largely due to preventable infectious diseases combined with malnutrition."
UNICEF also said that the interruption to vaccination services had left 2.6 million children under 15 at risk of measles, while 1.3 million have been exposed to acute respiratory infections such as pneumonia since the conflict escalated in March.
Some 2.5 million children are at risk of diarrhea - an increase of one million since the conflict broke out - due to poor sanitation and a lack of safe water.
More than half a million children under five are also at risk of developing severe and acute malnutrition in the next year if the situation continues to deteriorate, UNICEF said.
Additionally, eighty percent of Yemen's population - some 20 million people, half of whom are children - need humanitarian aid, according to UNICEF.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
