Nigeria: Medical team reaches survivors of Boko Haram massacre

A team from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) has reached some of the people who fled last week's onslaught on the town of Baga, to the city of Maiduguri, the main city of the Borno state. Injured, traumatised survivors are being treated in Maiduguri hospital by Ministry of Health teams. Some 5,000 survivors of the attack on Baga are staying in an overcrowded camp in Maiduguri known as ‘Teacher Village’, while others have settled on the shores of Lake Chad - where there is a danger of contracting malaria.

MSF said in a statement that a number of survivors of the attack are believed to still be in the Baga area, hiding in the bush. After assessing the most urgent needs, the charity has donated food, drugs and medical supplies to the health centre in ‘Teacher Village’, which was running short of supplies.

The MSF team will also support the camp’s health centre, with a focus on the health of pregnant women and children, who are particularly vulnerable. There is also tension in Maidaguri after a suicide bomb attack on the city’s market on 10 January, which killed 20 people. According to the director of the operations in Nigeria, in the last four years, the situation has seriously deteriorated in northeastern Nigeria.

The radicalization of Boko Haram and its change in strategy, with the occupation of villages and towns, mass kidnappings, creation of a caliphate, may result in further displacement of people, public health problems, especially epidemics, and difficulties in providing medical assistance in the region.

Today there are between 800,000 and one and a half million displaced people, mostly in the northeast of the country. MSF, which has been working in Nigeria since 2004, has had a permanent base in Maiduguri, the main city in Borno state, since August 2014.

Source: Fides