Disease

Refugees in Nigeria

More than 1200 people living in a camp for internally displaced people in northeastern Nigeria have died from starvation and sickness during the last year in what is becoming "a catastrophic humanitarian emergency," according to the medical humanitarian organisation Medecins sans Frontieres.

The camp, located in a hospital compound in the remote town of Bama in Nigeria's Borno state, hosts about 24,000 people, including 15,000 children, and they are in a "dire health situation," the aid agency said last week.

Violence in northern Nigeria fuelled by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram has forced more than 2.5 million people to flee their homes, according to United Nations statistics.

A medical team from Doctors Without Borders was able to get into Bama for the first time for a few hours on Tuesday to do an assessment, the aid group said. The team discovered 16 severely malnourished children at immediate risk of death and about 150 more youngsters suffering from "severe acute malnutrition," the deadliest form of the condition, according to the group. The sickest children were being treated at medical facilities in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.

According to the aid group, almost six people a day had died in the camp since May 23, mainly from diarrhoea and malnutrition, and the group's assessment team counted 1,233 graves that had been dug during the last year in a cemetery near the camp