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Hepatitis A and Other Diseases Surge Among Gaza’s Displaced, U.N. Says [1]
['Adam Sella', 'Matthew Mpoke Bigg']
Date: 2024-07-24
Sally Thabet, 40, said she had done all she could to protect her three daughters from illness after they fled their home in Gaza City, taking refuge in the town of Deir al Balah. But living in a former minimart, sharing a toilet with 20 others and washing dishes with dirty seawater, no amount of hand sanitizer could help.
One by one her girls fell sick with what doctors diagnosed as hepatitis A, a viral liver infection that is transmitted through person-to-person contact or contaminated food or water, and can spread quickly in unsanitary conditions.
“Amoon was the first to be diagnosed two months ago,” she said last week, adding that the 10-year-old girl developed a stomachache, stopped eating, started vomiting and looked pale. “I couldn’t see how yellowish she was because it is very dark inside the store.” Her other two children, Kenzy 15, and Kandi, 11, followed soon after.
More than 100,000 people in Gaza have contracted acute jaundice syndrome, or suspected hepatitis A, since the war between Hamas and Israel began on Oct. 7, the World Health Organization said last week.
It is just one disease that has spread rapidly in Gaza as most of the territory’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes, forced to live in squalid, crowded camps and makeshift shelters, while basic needs like clean water, sewage treatment, trash collection, soap and fuel for cooking have grown scarce.
There are also nearly one million cases of acute respiratory infections, half a million cases of diarrhea and 100,000 cases of lice and scabies, the W.H.O. said. On Friday, the agency’s chief, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that even polio, a disease that has been eradicated in much of the world, was present in Gaza. A variant of poliovirus has turned up there in six samples of water or wastewater, he said, meaning that some people there are infected, though no symptomatic cases have been reported.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/world/middleeast/gaza-war-hepatitis-polio.html
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