Hepatitis A, dysentery, and diarrhea: Gaza Battles Deadly Illnesses

An unseen and quiet assassin known only as illness is now pursuing the beleaguered Gaza inhabitants who have managed to escape Israel’s bombs and bullets.

According to 10 physicians and relief workers who spoke to Reuters, the enclave is set to be devastated by diseases as a result of the scarcity of food, clean water, and shelter, which has left hundreds of thousands of traumatized people exhausted. The health system has almost collapsed.

The conditions are now ideal for illness to spread. How bad will it become is the question of the day. In an interview on Tuesday, UNICEF’s main spokesman, James Elder, said.

World Health Organization (WHO) statistics show that between November 29 and December 10, the number of cases of diarrhea among children under five increased by 66% to 59,895 cases, while cases for the general population increased by 55% over the same time. Due to the war-related breakdown of all systems and services in Gaza, the UN agency said that the data were unavoidably incomplete.

Children suffering from severe dehydration, which may lead to renal failure in some situations, were overflowing the pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, according to Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra, who was speaking to Reuters on Tuesday. Severe diarrhea was also four times more common than usual.

“After a month there will be an explosion in the number of cases of Hepatitis A,” he said, citing his knowledge of 15 to 30 cases of Hepatitis A in Khan Younis over the previous two weeks. That is because the virus takes three weeks to a month to incubate.

Many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge in tents, abandoned buildings, and schools since the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas broke down on December 1. Aid workers said that a large number of people are sleeping outside without access to restrooms or water for showers.

WHO numbers from December 10 show that, at the same time, 21 of the 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are closed, 11 are partly operational, and four are barely operational.

Emergency medical coordinator Marie-Aure Perreaut oversees MSF’s operations in Gaza. She stated that the medical organization left a Khan Younis health center ten days ago due to Israeli evacuation orders, where it was providing treatment for skin infections, respiratory tract infections, and diarrhea.

It was now certain that two things would happen.

“The first is an epidemic of something like dysentery will spread across Gaza if we continue at this pace of cases, and the other certainty is that neither the ministry of Health nor the humanitarian organizations will be able to support the response to those epidemics,” she said.

The medical profession is facing challenges.

The indirect health impacts of the battle will deteriorate with time, according to a paper released by academic experts at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on November 6, one month after the Gaza war was started by Hamas’ assault on Israel.

After two months of fighting, they predicted that mothers’ nutrition would deteriorate and that the burden of baby malnutrition would rise as a result of interrupted feeding and care. “The probability of epidemic-prone pathogen introduction rising with time. Risk factors include a lack of proper sanitation and water supply.

Assistance providers claim that current events are precisely as anticipated by the London specialists. As many children might die from ailments like dysentery and watery diarrhea as Israeli bombing has killed so far, according to three specialists.

Of the 2.3 million Gazans, 1.3 million have been compelled to seek protection at UNRWA’s locations around the Mediterranean Sea due to two months of deadly combat and a “very tight siege,” according to the UN organization for Palestinian refugees.

Juliette Touma, the director of communications for UNRWA, said that “many of the shelters are overwhelmed with people seeking safety, with four or five times their capacity.” “Most of the shelters are not equipped with toilets or showers or clean water.”

UNRWA is now only running nine of the 28 basic health clinics it had before the war, according to Touma, in part because 135 of its employees have died and 70% of them have abandoned their homes since the conflict began.

UN special rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, said in a statement on December 7 that since October 7, at least 364 assaults on healthcare services had been verified in Gaza.

“The practice of medicine is under attack,” she said.

The ministry announced on Wednesday that since October 7, around 300 medical personnel and staff members from Gaza had died.

THE POSSIBLE EPIDEMIC

Syrian physician Salim Namour said the pictures from Gaza brought back memories of the conditions he had seen while treating the ill and injured in eastern Ghouta, outside of Damascus, during a protracted siege by the Syrian government.

According to him, the destruction of Ghouta’s sewage infrastructure and tainted water caused the spread of TB and hepatitis. Beyond the injuries from shelling, malnutrition reduced people’s resistance to infection, and a lack of children’s immunizations and medications promoted the spread of illness.

One approach to bring about the breakdown of civilization is via siege. According to Namour, a German resident who fled Ghouta in 2018, “It means hunger, shortages of medical supplies, no electricity, no refrigeration, no way to preserve medicines or food, and no heating.”

According to the health ministry in Gaza, its supply of pediatric immunizations ran out on Wednesday. Wednesday night, a camp in Rafah was forced to spend the night huddled in the cold on damp sand due to high winds and heavy rain that tore the tents apart and flooded the area.

As per a list the UN is presently utilizing for Gaza that Reuters saw on Tuesday, the UN is monitoring the prevalence of 14 illnesses with “epidemic potential” and is particularly worried about the skyrocketing rates of dysentery, watery diarrhea, and acute respiratory infections.

The head of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Humanitarian Health, Dr. Paul Spiegel, who is in Cairo assisting with the UN response, warned that unless several supply trucks were allowed in and clean water was supplied, an epidemic of diarrhea may occur as soon as tomorrow.

According to him, the UN intends to measure the mid-upper arm circumference, or MUAC test, of youngsters in Gaza in order to record the extent of acute malnutrition among them.

“When you have acute malnutrition, which is called wasting, people, they die from that, but then they are also so much more vulnerable to other diseases,” Spiegel said.

As of Monday, 83% of the population that has relocated to southern Gaza were not consuming enough food, according to the UN World Food Programme.

“IMPROVEABLE FOR HUMAN USE”

Aid workers said that instead of treating simply the trauma wounds they are already overburdened with, hospitals and health centers would need to be equipped to treat huge numbers of patients for such illnesses to prevent epidemics.

Larger supplies of food and medication would need to enter the Gaza Strip, and safe passage for humanitarian convoys carrying supplies would need to be given, according to relief workers. Drinking and bathing water would need to be accessible at minimum needed levels under emergency humanitarian standards.

Around 200 aid trucks per day used to enter Gaza under the most recent ceasefire, but that number has now dropped to 100, and heavy fighting has mostly prohibited any distribution outside of Rafah.

Physicians at Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah told Reuters on Tuesday that because of the filthy conditions in overcrowded shelters, they were overloaded with hundreds of patients in need of treatment for infections and contagious illnesses.

All infectious illnesses will break out across Rafah, according to Dr. Jamal Al-Hams.

Relentless hostilities have prevented many families from bringing their sick children to Nasser Hospital in time for treatment, which Al-Farra, the hospital’s pediatric chief, could not give effectively owing to a lack of medications.

“Children are (drinking) water that is unfit for human consumption,” said him. “There’s no fruit, no vegetables, so children have a deficiency in vitamins, in addition to … anemia from malnutrition.”

According to physicians and relief workers, newborns were also going hungry in the absence of clean water to combine with baby formula. Children were sick and had little food and water, according to Gazans who were employed by media businesses or foreign organizations, even though they were reasonably well-off.

Mahmoud Abu Sharkh, a father of three children who evacuated northern Gaza early in the conflict, stood among a sea of tents next to Nasser Hospital and pointed to the filthy conditions in the dusty camp around him.

After recovering for two days, the kids get ill once again on the third day.