War-weary Yemenis face death from hunger, disease – Study finds gene markers for drug-resistant malaria in Cambodia

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SANAA, Nov 4, (Agencies): In the Yemeni coastal town of Al-Tuhayta, 19 months into a devastating civil war, Futayni Ali watches helplessly as his five children complain of hunger.

“We couldn’t even buy shrouds to bury those of us who have already died from hunger,” says the fisherman in his 50s, referring to other town residents.

Ali used to make $30 a day from fishing in the Red Sea before the war between Shiite rebels and loyalists escalated in March 2015 with the intervention of a Saudi-led coalition.

But work stopped for Ali after the coalition started its military campaign including air strikes to push back the rebels, after they overran the capital Sanaa and advanced on other areas.

“We’re waiting for death to arrive. We can no longer do anything to feed our hungry children,” says the desperate father, who lives in the rebel-held western province of Hodeidah.

“We have sold all we had — even the beds we slept on and the plates we ate from.”

Almost 7,000 people, many of them civilians, have been killed and three million people displaced in the conflict since March 2015, according to the United Nations.

But in an impoverished country already suffering from widespread food insecurity before the war, hunger has also escalated with millions in need of food aid.

One and a half million children suffer from malnutrition, including 370,000 for whom it is so severe it weakens their immune system, the UN children’s agency says.

Hodeidah, where Ali and his family live, was Yemen’s poorest province even before the war. Today health authorities there warn of a “catastrophic situation due to starvation”.

The crisis is most visible in Ali’s hometown of Al-Tuhayta, where many have been reduced to skeletons with pale faces, sunken cheeks, and blank eyes.

“Around 5,000 people… could face death from hunger” in the town, warns town official Hassan Handiq.

In the provincial capital of Hodeidah, frail Saeeda — whose name ironically means happiness in Arabic — is struggling to stay alive.

“We have nothing left to eat,” the 18-year-old with protruding bones says, sitting on a wheelchair at a therapeutic feeding centre.

“We are slowly dying,” she says in a weak voice, her eyes reflecting her anguish.

“I want to go home.”

The UN food agency last week warned of alarming levels of hunger in Yemen, which already had one of the world’s highest levels of malnutrition before the war.

The World Food Programme said more than a third of children under five years old in Hodeidah showed signs of “acute malnutrition” — “more than double the emergency threshold of 15 percent”.

WFP Yemen director Torben Due has warned “an entire generation could be crippled by hunger”.

The World Health Organization has also warned that “shortages of food, medicine, and other basic commodities are… placing millions more people on the brink of starvation”.

Scientists have discovered genetic markers in malaria parasites linked to resistance to the key anti-malarial medicine piperaquine, and say their work could help doctors and health officials monitor and limit the spread of such resistance.

In research published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, the team also said a simple test using blood taken from a finger pinprick could show whether a malaria patient has parasites with the genetic markers — allowing doctors to prescribe an alternative treatment.

Resistance to piperaquine recently emerged in Cambodia and has led to the complete failure of malaria treatment there. This and other spreading areas of drug-resistance are threatening global efforts to eliminate the mosquito-borne disease.

Piperaquine is a powerful drug which is used in many parts of the world in combination with another anti-malarial drug called artemisinin.

Resistance to artemisinin emerged around seven years ago in Southeast Asia, but until recently the combination of the two drugs had successfully killed the malaria parasites there. Now, however, the emergence of piperaquine resistance in Cambodia has led to treatment failing altogether.

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