Around 600,000 Afghan children face death through malnutrition without emergency funds: UNICEF

From the UN News Website.

Taken by UNICEF/Thomas Nybo: UNICEF has been working with Nargas to ensure that her 15 month-old daughter Arzo doesn't become one of the many malnourished children in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan.

Speaking in Geneva, UN Children’s Fund spokesperson Christophe Boulierac, likened the humanitarian situation in the war-torn country to “one of the worst disasters on earth”.

And he warned that increased violence and last year’s severe drought have left hundreds of thousands of under-fives, critically vulnerable in the west and north of the country.

“There are two million children in the country which suffer from acute malnutrition, among them 600,000 children that suffer from severe acute malnutrition,” he said. “A child that suffers from acute severe malnutrition is a child that needs urgent treatment, otherwise he might die.”

While Afghanistan’s nutrition crisis is mirrored in many other trouble-spots around the world – from South Sudan to Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) - the UNICEF Spokesperson underlined the dangers, if funding is not found soon.

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