Médecins Sans Frontierès

 Click on the photo above to see the slideshowSouth Sudan. MSF doctor checking the heartrate of a child in intensive care. Photo: Olga OverbeekMore than 170,000 refugees have crossed from South Kordofan and Blue Nile states in Sudan, and are gathered in five camps in remote and inaccessible areas of South Sudan. Many of the refugees arrived in a very weak condition after weeks of walking, and the health situation in the camps has varied from bad to disastrous in the past months. In Batil camp, in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State, mortality was more than double the emergency threshold, according to MSF data from July. Up to half of children under two years old in the camp were malnourished, and MSF declared the health situation...

More than 2,000 white tents line the green hills near the village of Bambasi, in western Ethiopia. Since July, they have been home to 12,000 Sudanese refugees who fled their homeland and are now taking sanctuary from conflict in a camp established by the Ethiopian authorities and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Sudanese refugees in Bambasi, Ethiopia. Photo: Yann Libessart/MSF“I left Sudan with my husband and our eight children last year when the war reached our village Qeissan,” says a woman named Jamila, 30. “The Sudanese air force bombed us before troops attacked on the ground. Many people, including my older brother, were massacred. “The comprehensive peace agreement signed in January 2005 between the...

Humanitarian workers warn the influx could become a catastrophe. As many as 15 000 more refugees could stream across the border from Sudan by the end of the year... According to MSF, around two people per every 10 000 in the camp were dying each day, double what the organisation considers the emergency threshold. Around 25% of those admitted to the MSF hospital in Yida were dying. Many were acutely malnourished, and the rains brought malaria and diarrhoea...   Read article here. 

 Conditions in this malaria-infested and swampy land are grim, a perfect breeding ground for the clouds of flies that descend constantly on weakened children. Around 62 000 people are now crammed into Yida in Unity state, fleeing bombs and hunger in Sudan’s former bread-basket state, where Khartoum has been battling rebels for over a year, as well as in Blue Nile state, according to the UN...MSF emergency co-ordinator Foura Sassou said the main problem in the camp was now diarrhoea and malaria which “make people malnourished, especially the children”...In nearby beds, already tiny babies with wrinkled skin and hands – wrapped in bandages to stop them pulling out feeding tubes – look enormous in foil sheets covering them to help bring...