Wet season turns health crisis to catastrophe

Updated July 26, 2012 15:14:30

Refugees displaced by long-running conflicts in Sudan are continuing to flee across the border to South Sudan, but a full-blown health crisis has started to develop in refugee camps as the rainy season begins.

More than 120,000 refugees have fled from conflict in Sudan's Blue Nile State since late last year and are coming to camps in South Sudan's Upper Nile State that aid workers describe as "uniquely unsuited" to accommodating so many people.

Médecins Sans Frontières said almost three children were dying each day at the Jamam camp, mostly from diarrhoea, even before the onset of heavy rains.

Now, they say the mud wasteland has started to turn into a swampy flood plain. Latrines have overflowed, contaminating water on the ground, and many refugees, including children, are sleeping in wet clothes on sodden blankets.

This week ABC News Online spoke to Vanessa Cramond, a nurse from New Zealand working for MSF in Upper Nile State, as she prepared to travel with some of the refugees to a larger camp named Batil.

I'm standing in Jamam camp at the moment and it's about 60 kilometres to the border where the population has crossed. That part of the road that runs from Jamam camp to the border is particularly waterlogged. Trucks and tractors haven't been able to get through to help move people through to get them to a safer point where we can provide shelter and better access to water and food.

Many of the refugees have left their homes with very little preparation, so they didn't even have the normal buckets and shelter or blankets that they might have had at home. They moved fast, clearly, which means that when they arrived here they had little to ensure their and their families' survival.

It was quite a shocking scene, to see so many people with so very little, really struggling against the elements. This area of South Sudan is not the easiest in terms of geography. It's really open spaces, lots and lots of surface water, and it's the beginning of the rainy season, so it's a really challenging environment for the people to move through.

What we understand is that they are fleeing conflict and there have been reports from our patients of aerial attacks and things like that over the last month. There certainly are reports of people who are injured, injured family members, and people who have died.

I think what is the most pressing for us is what we see right now, which is large numbers of people with dehydration and diarrhoea from the journey because they were unprepared and because the walk has taken some time.

We've seen a huge amount of diarrhoea, a huge amount of skin infection, a huge amount of eye infection, which tells us that their ability to drink and wash and maintain their own hygiene is really limited. Alongside that there's been a huge amount of vulnerable children in this group so we've also been treating severe malnutrition.

One of the things that we're doing is to make sure that when people are travelling that they're well enough to travel and really encouraging those who are really vulnerable with sick children or pregnant women to rest or to come to hospital if they need to. 

Day to day, we're helping UNHCR - as they relocate the population - to medically screen individuals and have a quick 10-second look at everybody to make sure that they're well as they're boarding a bus or a truck, to make sure they don't incur any more ill health when they're on the journey.

We do encounter heavily pregnant women who are very close to their due date, or maybe not even close to their due date but just not doing very well. So we have a women's health unit here in Jamam camp and we've been encouraging those women to come and access services here with us.

The woman from Corinne's photo [above] was just diagnosed with malaria, which is a risk now as we approach the rainy season here in South Sudan, and malaria and pregnancy don't go very well together. That young woman did go into labour which was complicated by her malaria infection. Unfortunately that baby was too small to survive and died a few days later.

We're also caring for some very small babies that have been born on this journey. Some of these families have been walking for weeks and weeks even before they got to South Sudan and then continued their journey on this side of the border. Some babies are seven, eight, nine days old, born on the way, some before they were due.

Often we try and encourage those families to come to the hospital where we can help control the environment and the factors that may be detrimental to the children's health. We try to help them ensure that they gain weight and are breastfed well before they go out in to the camp.

People are pushing past the grief to get their immediate needs met. They're eager to get on those buses and get to that final destination. They want to get on the bus, they want to get to Batil, because they want to start this next chapter of their lives and secure their family in a safer place and make sure they have food and water and shelter.

Once some of those core needs are met we can start to support the community with the next layer which is assimilation to a new place, dealing with grief and bereavement from the past month, things they have seen, people they have lost along the way.

You can follow Corinne Baker as she photographs her work in South Sudan on Twitter: @RinBaker

Topics: relief-and-aid-organisations, disasters-and-accidents, sudan

First posted July 06, 2012 11:41:59