Fran BLANDY -
By the time he was brought into the remote clinic in northeastern South Sudan, two-year-old Nyachoat was already convulsing from the malaria attacking his brain. After being given medication he lies fast asleep, naked and feverish, attached to a drip, his anxious mother sitting on the bed next to him.
Nyachoat could be saved, but others are not so lucky. In South Sudan mind-bending horrors abound of war, ethnic violence, rape, hunger and displacement. But for civilians living in the shadow of conflict, the greatest danger is often being cut off from health services, whether due to violence or lack of development in the vast, remote areas that make up much of the country.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which supports the tiny clinic where Nyachoat is recovering in Udier village, 70 per cent of all illness deaths are due to easily treatable malaria, acute watery diarrhoea and respiratory infections.
In case of more serious illness there is “no place” to go, said Nyachoat’s 22-year-old mother Buk Gader. A study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) last year showed almost 400,000 people had died as a result of South Sudan’s nearly six-year war.
Half of these were due to violent deaths, and half because of the increased risk of disease and reduced access to healthcare as a result of the conflict. ICRC health field officer Irene Oyenya said the Upper Nile region was particularly affected.
“There were (aid) organisations which were supplying primary healthcare, but then during the war, most of the organisations got evacuated” and pulled out of the country, she said.
Udier is a village with a dirt airstrip whose sun-baked sand, which when not used by twice weekly ICRC flights bringing medicine and supplies, serves as a football pitch for youths. It is also a pedestrian highway for those who come from far flung huts and cattle camps to market. Marginalised for decades prior to independence from Sudan in 2011, and engulfed in war since 2013, South Sudan has seen little development. The healthcare sector is one of many propped up by international aid organisations. — AFP
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