At least seven people have died of dehydration in Somalia over the past month as severe water shortages from a killer regional drought force many to drink their own urine, an aid agency said on Thursday.
In neighbouring Kenya, the drought-related death toll of at least 40 rose as police said four women, including two sisters, on a desperate hunt for water were killed in the collapse of a nearly dry well in the parched north-west.
Oxfam International said communities in southern and central Somalia were living in searing 40°C heat with only three glasses of water a day per person for drinking, washing and cooking.
”The situation is as bad as I can remember,” said Abdullahi Maalim Hussein, a Somali elder who accompanied a recent Oxfam assessment mission to the worst-hit areas.
”Some people are dying and children are drinking their own urine because there is simply no water available for them to drink,” he said in a statement released in Nairobi by the British-based group.
The tiny amount of water available, for which many families have to walk up to 70km to get, is one-twentieth of the daily supply recommended by minimum humanitarian standards, Oxfam said.
The group’s assessment mission said at least seven people and potentially many more had already died from drought-related dehydration since mid-January and that the number would almost certainly rise even with emergency aid.
”The situation will get worse unless swift action is taken,” said Mohamed Elmi, Oxfam’s regional programme manager. ”People cannot survive on just three glasses of water a day when the temperature is hitting 40 degrees.”
Of the Somalis at risk, Oxfam said about 200 000 living along the Kenya-Somalia border in the Gedo and Lower Juba regions are in dire need of urgent water supplies.
About eight million people in four East African countries, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, are now in need of food assistance to stave off drought-related starvation.
Livestock-dependent pastoralist communities that live in the affected areas have been hardest hit as cattle, goats and camels die in unprecendented numbers from hunger and thirst.
Many international appeals for aid have focused on dire shortages of food and animal fodder, but Oxfam said the lack of drinking water in Somalia was critical.
”As well as food, these communities desperately need water,” it said.
”Without water children will die, and the livestock on which pastoralists depend will end up as rotting corpses around dry wells.”
In Kenya’s north-west Turkana district, dried up rivers and barren boreholes led the deaths of the four women in the well collapse late last week in a remote area near the Kenyan-Sudanese border, police said.
”They were buried alive on Friday after the sands of the well caved in,” Turkana police commander Julius Muli said, adding that his office had not been informed of the collapse until Monday.
”Water shortage here is a big problem,” Muli told Agence France-Presse by telephone from Lodwar, about 510km northwest of Nairobi.
”All the seasonal rivers have dried up and people have to walk for several kilometres to sparse boreholes.”
In neighbouring Ethiopia, famine conditions are causing severe food shortages for more than one million people and livestock deaths, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned this week.
In an $18,5-million emergency appeal, the Rome-based organisation said the Somali and Oromiya regions were particularly hard hit.
FAO’s head of emergency operations Anne Bauer described the situation as ”alarming”.
Autumn rains had failed and the situation was made worse by an influx of ”large numbers” of livestock from drought-affected regions of Kenya and Somalia, the FAO said.
”Initial estimates indicate more than one million people in Somali region alone require immediate assistance to stave off starvation, and the onset of the dry season from January to March is expected to worsen the situation,” the organisation said.
The money is needed to support emergency animal health measures to save lifestock, provide seeds and emergency irrigation schemes.
The FAO said it was also working with the government to ensure strong surveillance and monitoring measures to guard against the threat of potentially devastating bird flu. – AFP
