Bottom of the list: A health crisis in Nigeria

There had been a polio outbreak recently in Borno.
In two years there hadn't been a case.
Everyone thought Polio was gone.
I was actually following up on the Polio situation
and started seeing reports from the Borno government
and others that this huge crisis was underway
and everybody knew Boko Haram was there
and committed terrible atrocities but no one knew
how many people had been trapped
living under Boko Haram control.
The army came in and started liberating areas.
That's when they realized that there were millions
of people who had been deprived of everything
for about five or eight years.
Almost two million people have been displaced
and they're crowding into camps that can't
accommodate them and communities that are so poor
that they can't feed themselves in the first place.

The UN estimates that without
Polio essentially is a sign that the
health system has collapsed
Malaria--child mortality was off the charts
And a measles outbreak
I was horrified by the combination
My name is Leslie Roberts
and I'm a deputy news editor at Science Magazine
I went to northern Nigeria
to look at this humanitarian crisis
with support from the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
The worst of the crisis is concentrated
in Borno
We visited Maiduguri
The first thing we did was go to the feeding center
It was in a courtyard
with lots of women with their children
waiting and these are kids who
had already been screened
and they had severe acute malnutrition
which is the worst kind
and if you're not treated, 1 in 5 dies
But these kids were already on treatment
They're getting ready to eat therapeutic food
then they would measure the kid's arm
to see if they were recovering
Malnutrition is bad enough in itself
and then it suppresses the immune system
so when you get these infections
a severely malnourished child
is 9 times more likely to die
The next day we took the UN helicopter to Monguno
in the very north east corner of the state
which has only been open
for about 6 months
the areas around it
are still under Boko Haram control
And the conditions here are even worse
than in Maiduguri
We went to a UNICEF clinic
And the health worker would ask:
How long has your kid been sick?
What are the symptoms?
The kid would have fever and cough
Ordinarily you use a rapid diagnostic test
which is the finger prick of blood
but hers had expired
so she had no choice but to treat everybody
as if they had malaria
We went to that transit post
This is something that the polio eradication initiative
has started fairly recently
They usually go door-to-door
to vaccinate kids
But in Nigerian is this crisis
so many people are on the move
They find that they're missing a lot of kids
So they select, in this case it's a road
that goes between two areas
that are inaccessible
under Boko Haram control
and also heads into Maiduguri
(the capital)
So they could get people fleeing Boko Haram
They could get nomads
Anytime a woman goes by with a child
They flag her over
and see if the child has been vaccinated
and if not, vaccinate the child
One young doctor took us to the measles ward
Nobody knows exactly how many kids are affected
but he was saying:
I don't need lab confirmations
this is huge
He's seeing more than 40 kids a week
First they have the rash
The kids have conjunctivitis--
their eyes are swollen
and if it's not treated and can lead to blindness
A lot have respiratory infections
And there were kids who had to be on oxygen
Other kids have diarrhea that so bad
they're on IVs
Some of the children have sores in their mouth
So they can't eat
which exacerbates malnutrition
In a developing country, without a crisis
you'd see about 2% mortality
In disasters like this, you see 10%
sometimes even 30%
There are easy fixes
for a lot of these problems
The biggest need is really the screen for malnutrition
and treating these kids with food
The army, the air force
have to continue their fight
And then more money
more aid groups, relief groups
need to get in and need to get access
But the scale is so big
and so many are inaccessible still
To talk to people about what had happened to them
it was devastating
They all had tales of children they'd lost
or husbands had been murdered
And it just seems so appalling
that nothing had been done
Nobody--it's this forgotten place
Part of it is there are so many crises
all over the world right now
That they're all vying for the same pot of money
But for some reason Nigeria seems to be
at the bottom of the list

Bottom of the list: A health crisis in Nigeria

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