Skin diseases including lice and rashes running rampant in war-torn Gaza
File photo.
Skin diseases including lice, scabies, and rashes are running rampant in the war-torn Gaza Strip, the news agency Associated Press reported on Tuesday (Jul30) citing health officials. According to officials, the cause of these diseases is the appalling conditions in overcrowded tent camps housing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes.
The skin diseases are also spreading due to the ongoing summer and the collapse of sanitation in Gaza which has left pools of open sewage amid 10 months of Israeli bombardment in the Palestinian region.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said that doctors (in the Gaza Strip) have been dealing withmore than 103,000 cases of lice and scabies and 65,000 cases of skin rashes.
'No shampoo, no soap'
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Palestinians in Gaza told the Associated Press that cleanliness was impossible in the ramshackle tents.
"There’s no shampoo, no soap.The water is dirty. Everything is sand and insects and garbage," said a Palestinian living in a tentin the dunes outside the southern city of Khan Younis.
She said that the family tent wasrammed with her grandchildren, many of whom had rashes.“One child gets it (rashes), and it spreads to all of them,” she added.
People living in tent camps also said thatclean water was almost impossible to get. Some washed their childrenin salt water from the nearby Mediterranean. People wear the same clothesday after day until they’re able to wash them, then they wear them again immediately.
Distribution of supplies slowed to a trickle
The United Nations (UN) has said that the distributionof humanitarian supplies including soap, shampoo, and medicines, has slowed to a tricklebecause Israeli military operations and general lawlessness in Gaza make it too dangerous for relief trucks to move.
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Nassim Basala, a dermatologist at Nasser Hospital, said that the hospital was getting 300 to 500 people a day coming in with skin diseases.Scabies and lice are at epidemic proportions, he said, but other fungal, bacterial and viral infections and parasites are also running wild.
He also pointed out thatcreams and ointments were in short supply at the hospital.
(With inputs from agencies)