Across Borno state, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is running 11 permanent health facilities, while its medical teams make regular visits to five more health facilities. MSF is deeply concerned for the hundreds of thousands of people who could be living in areas of the state where aid agencies have not been granted access and who may not have food, water or medical care.
MSF's pediatric and nutrition advisor, Dr. Kerstin Hanson, said: "When I go to the field, I'm used to being surrounded by a lot of kids. Bubbly, jumping, laughing. In Borno this is not the case, especially in the displacement camps where the kids, especially the children under five, were missing. Most of them had, unfortunately, already died. On the other hand, however, in our hospital for severely, acutely malnourished children with really severe medical complications, here the number of malnourished kids was alarming. They were of a severity that I had not recently seen in any of the projects that I've visited."
