Arakan News Agency
The World Health Organisation has appealed for more donor supports for Rohingyas ahead of monsoon, fearing the tropical season to expose the forcibly displaced Myanmar population in Bangladesh to intensified health risks.
‘For us, it [monsoon] is a great worry,’ WHO’s Regional Director for South-East Asia Poonam Khetrapal Singh told BSS in an interview, a day after she visited the improvised and crowded Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar bordering Myanmar’s Arakan State, their homeland.
She said WHO launched a second appeal for expanded international help for the Rohingyas ahead of the rainy season while it simultaneously planned to start a fourth round of vaccination to prevent the possible outbreak of cholera epidemics in Rohingya camps.
The WHO regional chief particularly expressed concerns about the poor sanitation system at the camp scene saying ‘for now, it is manageable, but when the rain starts sanitation will be a big challenge’.
‘Help is coming, the sentiment of help is there in Geneva,’ she said referring to the prospects of donor response to the appeal analysed in WHO headquarters in the Swiss city.
The regional chief of World Health Organisation for the region (WHO-SEARO) is in Bangladesh on a four-day visit to witness the crisis involving Myanmar’s ethnic population, who fled their home to evade military atrocities.
The UN called the Myanmar military actions ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’ and rights groups described as genocide.
Currently, Khetrapal said, WHO was spending $1million every month to extend health care supports to Rohingyas but the global health body was prepared to enhance the amount if the situation deserved.
Khetrapal Singh said three rounds of diphtheria, measles and cholera vaccines were administered in Rohingya camps as ‘this (vaccination), I thought is very useful, because the greatest worry is of course monsoon’.
‘We will go for another round of vaccination after the fourth one and we have enough stock of vaccine at the camps . . . WHO has assessed the risk and procured the vaccine,’ she said.
