Plight of Iraqi children shocks Canadian MD
CMAJ 1998;159:435
© 1998 Heather Kent
A Vancouver physician who recently returned from a visit to Iraq says a "medical emergency" exists there because of sanctions imposed by the United Nations following the 1991 Gulf war. Dr. Allan Connolly, who is active with Physicians for Global Survival, recently travelled to the Middle East with the New York-based UN Sanctions Challenge organization to distribute medical supplies.
Connolly visited 4 hospitals in Baghdad and Basra, a city close to the Kuwaiti border that was heavily damaged during both the Iran–Iraq and Gulf wars. He took 450 kg of donated medical supplies from Canada on the 8-hour bus trip from the capital to Basra, where he saw "children dying in front of my eyes" in hospitals without staff or electricity. The children's mothers provided care as best they could.
At one hospital the only physician on duty showed Connolly around wards where about 30 children were suffering from severe malnourishment and "other preventable diseases." The experience had a "searing impact" on Connolly, who cites the combination of toxic water, air pollution, depleted uranium and a lack of medicine and food as the major public-health challenges facing Iraq. Before the Gulf war the country imported 80% of its food, says Connolly, and availability has gone "downhill ever since."
Although conditions were better at hospitals in Baghdad, Connolly says health problems there have been worsened because the city's population has tripled since the Gulf war ended. Connolly is also concerned about increasing cancer rates in Iraqi children. Acute lymphocytic and acute myelogenous leukemia are the most common forms, he says, and the hospitals lack the dollars and drugs to treat them. The number of surgical procedures being performed annually is now 25% of the 1989 total.
Although the UN sanctions are supposed to allow humanitarian aid into the country, Connolly says only about 5% of the medical supplies the country needs is getting in. He would like Canadian physicians to become involved by sending medical journals to Iraqi doctors and sending research teams to study the impact of depleted uranium on cancer rates. "We need to reach out to our colleagues in Iraq," he says. "This is a specific place for medicine to act."
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