Gaza | Deaths to ‘skyrocket’ from disease outbreaks, WHO warns

Joining me now is Dr Margaret Harris a spokesperson for the World Health Organization Dr thank you for joining us today thank you thank you very much for having me Roger what’s uh your response to the fact that some fuel is getting in is that enough it’s not enough it’s a good sign

I can only say a good start it’s not nearly enough not nearly what we need we need 120,000 per day at least but a lot more than that just to get things going again absolutely everything stopped as you know and we’re particularly concerned about the sewage systems not working obviously the hospitals not

Being able to have any fuel to to continue their life-saving work and the Water Systems the desalination systems not working so all the things that you need to keep the basic Public Health functions going are not going at the moment and that obviously raising concerns about disease outbreak things like

Chalera absolutely we are really concerned we’re already seeing a large rise in reports of diarrhea now the laboratory systems aren’t working so we can’t even tell you what the causes of that is but we know that’s coming from polluted water and from people being very very close together and being

Unable to wash unable to wash their food their hands Etc uh and we’ve got cases that are in the sort of 40s 50, thousands when we’d expect to see about 2,000 cases a lot of those cases are in children and remember these are people who are starving who are dehydrated who

Are terrified they mental health is they’re under enormous stress they haven’t slept for 5 weeks so their immune systems will be tremendously weak so the the the rates of death from disease will only Skyrocket as these diseases take hold when you hear those numbers I mean obviously concerning is

There a point though where you simply say it’s out of control how do how do you get it back under control of at that point when it comes to the diseases well it really is out of control now because there is nothing that any of the health um support system

Can do right now because there’s no food there’s no water there’s no power and there are fewer and fewer hospital beds we’ve gone from 3,500 hospital beds to possibly a, but really they’re operating mostly these first aid stations and they’re dealing with huge numbers of seriously injured people so all the

Other things you normally do to stop an outbreak to deal with people who have these infectious diseases simply can’t be done right now if there were a ceasefire call today how long would it take to get things not to normal but just even to get it under control and start helping

People certainly it means we could especially if we were allowed to get the power and the medical supplies in right away and those medical supplies are piled up on the other side of the Border we really want to get them in as quickly as possible if we could get the people

The power the the supplies in it could make a huge difference very very quickly Dr Margaret Harris the spokesperson for The Who thank you very much for joining us this morning thank you very much for having me

WHO’s Dr. Margaret Harris says depleting health resources in Gaza have sparked outbreaks that are exacerbating deaths in the region.

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