Medics in Mogadishu’s hospitals are being overwhelmed by casualties from the fighting in Somalia, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.
Children aged under five years old accounted for 10% of reported injuries, which included shrapnel and gunshot wounds, fractures and crush injuries.
“In March 2010 alone, at least 900 conflict-related injuries and 30 deaths were reported at Mogadishu’s three main hospitals,” WHO spokesperson Paul Garwood told a news briefing.
He told Reuters: “Healthcare workers are struggling to cope, they are overwhelmed with the huge increase in wounded. It is stretching an already weak healthcare system to the limit.”
Somalia’s government controls just a few blocks in the capital, and al-Shabaab rebels, who want to impose a harsh version of sharia law on the anarchic nation, control large swathes of southern and central Somalia.
At least 3,2-million people are affected by Somalia’s humanitarian crisis, according to the WHO, a United Nations agency. About 1 400 women die per every 100 000 live births. At least 86 infants per 1 000 die before reaching their first birthday.
Only 250 qualified doctors, 860 nurses and 116 midwives work today in Somalia, home to the lowest number of health workers of any country in the Horn of Africa or Middle East, WHO said.
The rate translates into 0,11 health workers per 1 000 people, about half of the minimum threshold required to conduct essential health services, it said.
Omar Saleh, a WHO specialised trauma surgeon, has just returned from training 33 doctors, nurses and midwives in Mogadishu, the WHO said. He has trained about 100 workers in the past year.
Somalia had 300 doctors as recently as 2006, but some have fled the country, part of a “brain drain”, while others have been victims of the violence, including some killed by a blast at a graduation ceremony last December, Garwood said.
At least 13 civilians were killed in fighting between Somali government forces and hard-line Islamist militants in Mogadishu on Monday and bomb blasts killed six people, rescue services and the police said. — Reuters