Gaza's drinking water spurs blue baby syndrome

Gaza - The unshaven doctor with circles under his eyes enters the children's ward at Al Nassar hospital in Gaza City. It's a Thursday evening, almost the weekend. The ward is bleak and eerily quiet, but for the occasional wail of an infant.
At each cubicle, sectioned off by curtains, it's a similar image: A baby lies alone in a bed, hooked up to tubes, wires and a generator; a mother sits in silent witness at the bedside.
Dr Mohamad Abu Samia, the hospital's director of paediatric medicine, exchanges a few quiet words with one mother, then gently lifts the infant's gown, revealing a scar from heart surgery nearly half the length of her body.
At the next cubicle, he attends to a child suffering from severe malnutrition. She lies still, her tiny body connected to a respirator. Because electricity runs only four hours a day in Gaza, the baby must stay here, where generators keep her alive.
"We are very busy," the overwhelmed doctor says. "Babies suffering from dehydration, from vomiting, from diarrhoea, from fever." The skyrocketing rate of diarrhoea, the world's second largest killer of children under five, is reason enough for alarm.
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In Pictures: Gaza water crisis worsens

But in recent months Dr Abu Samia has seen sharp rises in gastroenteritis, kidney disease, paediatric cancer, marasmus - a disease of severe malnutrition appearing in infants – and "blue baby syndrome", an ailment causing bluish lips, face, and skin, and blood the colour of chocolate.
Before, the doctor says, he saw "one or two cases" of blue baby syndrome in five years. Now it's the opposite - five cases in one year.
 
To read the full text of the news report, click here.

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