Malnutrition Rates Are Alarming in Leer, South Sudan

Before the conflict that erupted in South Sudan in mid-December 2013, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) would typically have around 200 children in its ambulatory therapeutic feeding center (ATFC) at any one time, said Grace Ayuelu, MSF medical team leader in Leer. Ayuelu has been working in Leer hospital for almost a year.

“But now, we have over 1,800 children,” she said. “That is a big number.”  

During the conflict, many people’s houses in Leer, as well as the MSF hospital, were looted and razed to the ground. People fled into the bush for safety, many of them going months without anything to eat other than wild roots and whatever else could be gathered from the land.

People are now starting to return to Leer, and the partially destroyed MSF hospital is up and running again, although at half its previous capacity. Now, the busiest area of MSF’s Leer hospital is the ATFC, where children under five are seen and their level of nutrition assessed.  

There are over 207 MSF staff from South Sudan and beyond currently working in Leer, providing emergency nutrition and outpatient care to the population. The MSF project in Leer also accounts for two other ambulatory therapeutic feeding centers in southern Unity state, one in Nyal and another in Mayendit.

Before its hospital was destroyed at the end of January, MSF had been working in Leer for the past 25 years, providing both in- and out-patient care for children and adults, surgery, maternity, HIV/TB treatment, and intensive care. The hospital was the only fully functioning secondary facility in all of southern Unity State, serving 270,000 people.