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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 what's 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 2 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
a point five million people are in need
of humanitarian assistance 5.1 million
are malnourished
more than half of those children the UN
estimates that without treatment 75,000
of those children will die by June
probably Oh essentially is a sign that
the health system has collapsed malaria
you know child mortality was off the
charts and measles outbreak I was
horrified by the combination of
malnutrition and infectious disease
my name is Leslie Roberts and I'm a
deputy news editor at science magazine I
went to northern Nigeria to look at this
Medicare in crisis with support from the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting the
worst of the crisis is concentrated in
Boyle 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 were kids who had already been
screened and they had severe acute
malnutrition which is the worst kind and
if you're not treated one in five diets
but these kids were already on treatment
they're getting this they're ready to
eat therapeutic food then they would
measure the kids arm to see if they were
recovering malnutrition it's bad enough
in itself and then it suppresses the
immune system so when you get these
infections a severely malnourished child
was nine times more likely to die the
next day we took the UN helicopter to
monguno in the very northeast corner of
the state which has only been open for
about six months the areas around it are
still under Boko Haram
and the conditions here are even worse
than in Maiduguri
there we went to a UNICEF clinic and the
health worker would ask how long has it
been sick what are the symptoms the kid
would have fever and cough ordinarily
you use a rapid diagnostic test which is
a 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 and
vaccinate kids but in Nigeria in 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 completely 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 fly 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 confirmation this this is huge
and he's seeing more than forty 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's so bad their 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
percent mortality and disasters like
this you see ten percent are sometimes
even 30
there are easy fixes for a lot of these
problems the biggest need is really the
screening for malnutrition and treating
these kids with food the army the Air
Force have to continue their fight and
then more money more a groups relief
groups you need to get in you need to
get access but the scale is so big and
so many are inaccessible still to talk
to the people about what had happened to
them it was devastating that 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 has forgotten place and part
of it is there are so many crises all
over the world right now but they're all
vying for the same pot of money but for
some reason Nigeria seems to be at the
bottom of the list
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