‘Sickest child I had ever seen’: Canadian doctor recounts hunger in Gaza
Dr Yipeng Ge, a Canadian physician who spent a week treating patients in Gaza in February, said every single person in the territory has been touched by “the overlapping crises of food, water and housing insecurity”.
“One of the children I saw was the sickest child I had ever seen in my medical career,” Ge told Al Jazeera. “He was carried in by his mother and wasn’t able to walk any more because of how malnourished he was. And I could wrap my index finger and my thumb entirely around both the upper arm and the lower leg of this child. And he was nine-10 years old.”
Ge said he was worried the child might have already died.
He added that the lack of water and food, as well as the overcrowding of people into tents in unsanitary conditions, had resulted in outbreaks of respiratory infections, gastrointestinal diseases and a major outbreak of Hepatitis A.
“To heal from such things, we need nutritious food, we need clean water. And without this, we are seeing the worst of the worst, not only communicable diseases and infections which are entirely preventable and also treatable. But we can’t even treat them because of the lack of nutrition and lack of antibiotics,” he said.
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