UN says 363 deaths recorded in Darfur camps in 5 weeks
By Jonathan Wright
CAIRO, Aug 17 (Reuters) – Health workers in camps for more than 800,000 displaced people in western Sudan registered 363 deaths in the camps in the five weeks up to the end of July, according to a U.N. document released on Tuesday.
The statistics, in a morbidity and mortality weekly bulletin compiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO), suggest a lower death toll from disease and malnutrition in the western region of Darfur than some politicians have suggested.
U.S. official Roger Winter said last month the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) estimated that 50,000 people have died in Darfur “from humanitarian-related reasons” since the crisis started early last year.
That would be on top of up to 30,000 people killed in fighting or in other violence during the same period, said Winter, who is USAID’s assistant administrator.
Darfur has a total population of just over six million and about one million — the most vulnerable — have been displaced by conflict, most of them within the past year.
Patrick Mazimhaka, deputy chairman of the African Union, said on Tuesday that 1,000 people a day were dying in Darfur, mostly of hunger-related diseases.
But the WHO bulletin, which includes data for 40 of the 54 camps in Darfur, including all the biggest ones, shows that severe malnutrition was the cause of death in 47 of the 363 cases recorded over the five weeks.
The bulletin notes that the data cannot be considered fully representative of the health situation in Darfur, a remote and inaccessible region the size of France.
The statistics do not cover people living in the countryside or in the other 14 camps and maybe not even all of those who died in the camps where some data were reported.
UNDER SURVEILLANCE
The statistics come from health workers in settlements for internally displaced people and from hospitals. “As such it can only be a snapshot of conditions in those facilities … where, it can be argued, standards of access, security and assistance are higher than in the rest of Darfur,” the bulletin said.
But it also said that the 810,774 people in the 40 camps, 66 percent of displaced Darfuris, were under epidemiological surveillance for at least a part of the five-week period.
About half the deaths — 177 out of 363 — were among children under five and severe malnutrition was the single largest killer for them. Among those five and older, malaria, jaundice and fevers all caused more deaths than malnutrition.
The statistics showed that most illnesses, except measles and malnutrition, were on the increase.
The United Nations says the conflict in Darfur has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Rebels took up arms against the government in February 2003, complaining of harassment by Arab nomads and discrimination against the region’s non-Arab population.
The government responded by deploying Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed as auxiliaries. The Janjaweed went on a rampage, burning villages and driving people out of their homes.
An American aid official just returned from Darfur said on Monday that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush was exaggerating the gravity of the crisis in Darfur for domestic political reasons.
USAID administrator Andrew Natsios said in June that hundreds of thousands of people were at risk of death in Darfur.
“Natsios’s shrill warning a month or so ago is based on projections, not true numbers, and everyone now acknowledges they are way off,” the aid official said.