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Disease in Gaza [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-17
Cole begins his article by asking a question:
What happens when you force 1.8 million people into a postage-stamp-sized territory and destroy or damage half of their dwelling places, breaking the water pipes with 2000-pound bombs?
Cole’s answer: “You create homeless people sleeping rough, with few toilets. Many people are forced to urinate and defecate in the streets.”
He quotes details from a UN report:
“Due to the lack or limited capacity of latrines, people are adopting unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as open defecation. In shelters, people wait for hours to access toilets, and in some locations adults resort to buckets and dispose of the waste in improvised areas or solid waste dumps.”
Cole adds:
Since many water pipes have been broken by the bombardment and anyway there is no fuel to pump the water through them, there is almost no potable water. People are drinking from puddles, which are contaminated. Most have no means of boiling the water collected from such puddles, so there is no way to make it safe.
Cole says the Palestinian Ministry of Health has provided the following information from the UN report referred to above:
There have been significant increases or increased risk of outbreak in some communicable diseases and conditions such as diarrhea, influenza, chicken pox, meningitis, jaundice, impetigo acute respiratory infections, skin infections and hygiene-related conditions like lice and scabies. The heavy rains and flooding which affected large parts of Gaza on 13 December compounded human misery and added to the risk of waterborne diseases.
Cole quotes details from Ministry of Health spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra as reported in The Middle East Monitor:
In his daily press briefing yesterday, Al-Qudra explained that health teams have detected 327,000 cases of infectious diseases that arrived at health centres from shelters, noting that the actual number is likely much higher, since many people cannot reach health care centres.
Cole also quotes James Elder, a spokesperson for UNICEF who was recently in Gaza. Elder says 100,000 children have diarrhea and 150,000 suffer from respiratory diseases. He also reports that one physician said he expects:
the same number of children to die of disease as have been killed by Israeli bombing. Currently the latter are estimated at over 7,000, though that does not count the little bodies under the rubble.
Cole mentions some hospitals still trying to care for patients, but “apparently they have run out of antibiotics.”
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