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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="http://imemc.org/article/contaminated-drinking-water-in-gaza-spurs-blue-baby-syndrome/">http://imemc.org/article/contaminated-drinking-water-in-gaza-spurs-blue-baby-syndrome/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Contaminated Drinking Water in Gaza
Spurs ‘Blue Baby Syndrome’</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time">November 8, 2018<br>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Asked if he has studies to back up his findings, he
says: “We live in Gaza, in an emergency situation … We
have time only to relieve the problem, not to research
it.”</p>
<p>Yet Palestinian Ministry of Health figures support the
doctor’s findings. They show a
“doubling” of diarrheal disease, rising to epidemic
levels, as well as spikes last summer in salmonella and
even typhoid fever.</p>
<p>Independent, peer-reviewed medical journals
have also documented increased <a
href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135092"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">infant mortality</a>, <a
href="https://mafiadoc.com/abstract-book-of-accepted-abstracts-lpha-2017-_59e429641723ddad37221ec1.html"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">anaemia</a>, and
an “alarming magnitude” of <a
href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29268788"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">stunting</a> among
Gaza’s children.</p>
<p>A Rand Corporation <a
href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium.MAGAZINE-polluted-water-a-leading-cause-of-gazan-child-mortality-says-rand-corp-study-1.6566812"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> has found
that bad water is a leading cause of child mortality in
Gaza.</p>
<p>Simply put, Gaza’s children are facing a deadly health
epidemic of unprecedented proportions.</p>
<p>“So much suffering,” says Dr. Abu Samia. It is, he
says, a matter of “life and death”.</p>
<p>Multiple factors are to blame for the uncoiling health
crisis, but medical experts agree on one central
culprit: Gaza’s scarce and contaminated drinking water,
owing to Israel’s economic siege, its repeated bombing
of water and sewage infrastructure and a collapsing
aquifer of such poor quality that <a
href="https://phys.org/news/2017-03-war-scarred-gaza-pollution-health-woes.html"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">97 percent</a> of Gaza’s
drinking-water wells are below minimal health
standards for human consumption.</p>
<p>Dr. Majdi Dhair, director of preventive medicine at the
Palestinian Ministry of Health, reports a “huge
increase” in waterborne disease, which he says a
“directly related to drinking water” and to
contamination from untreated sewage water flowing
directly into the Mediterranean.</p>
<p>A visit to Gaza’s densely-packed Shati (or
“Beach”) refugee camp helps explain why. There, 87,000
refugees and their families – expelled from their towns
and villages during the creation of Israel in 1948 – are
packed into half a square kilometre of cement-block
structures along the Mediterranean.</p>
<p>“Water and electricity? Forget about it,” says Atef
Nimnim, who lives with his mother, wife, and two younger
generations – 19 Nimnims in all – in a small three-room
dwelling in Shati.</p>
<p>The Gaza aquifer that sputters through their taps is
far too salty, hardly anyone in Gaza drinks it any more.
For drinking water, Atef’s 15-year-old son piles plastic
jugs onto a wheelchair and rolls it to the mosque, where
he fills the family’s containers, courtesy of<a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/organisations/hamas.html">Hamas</a>.</p>
<p>Most families, even in the refugee camps, spend up to
half their modest income on the desalinated water from
Gaza’s unregulated wells. But even that sacrifice comes
at a cost.</p>
<p><strong>Faecal contamination</strong></p>
<p>Palestinian Water Authority tests show that up to 70
percent of the desalinated water delivered by a small
army of private trucks and stored in the camps’ rooftop
tanks, is prone to faecal contamination.</p>
<p>Even microscopic amounts of E coli can bloom into a
health crisis.</p>
<p>The reason for that, explains Gregor von Medeazza,
UNICEF’s water and sanitation specialist for Gaza, is
that the longer the E coli remain in the water, the more
“they start growing” in the water and the worse
it gets. This leads to chronic diarrhoea, which in turn
can lead to stunting in Gaza’s children, as a British
medical journal recently <a
href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5740756/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">documented</a>. One
effect, von Medeazza says, is on “brain development,”
and a “measurable effect on the IQ” of affected
children.</p>
<p>High salinity and nitrate levels from Gaza’s collapsing
aquifer – so badly overpumped that seawater is flowing
in – are at the root of many of Gaza’s health
problems. Elevated nitrate levels lead to hypertension
and renal failure, and are linked to the rise in blue
baby syndrome. Waterborne maladies like infant
diarrhoea, salmonella and typhoid fever are caused
by faecal contamination – both from the rooftop
desalinated water and from the 110 million litres of raw
and poorly-treated sewage that flows into the
Mediterranean every day.</p>
<p>Because electricity here is shut off for 20 hours a
day, Gaza’s sewage plant is essentially useless; hence,
brown water spews into the sea, 24/7, from long pipes
above a beach just north of Gaza City. Yet in the
summertime, children continue to swim along Gaza’s
beaches.</p>
<p>In 2016, five-year-old Mohammad Al-Sayis swallowed
sewage-laced seawater, ingesting faecal bacteria that
led to a fatal brain disease. Mohammad’s was the first
known death by sewage in Gaza.</p>
<p>Making matters worse: Israeli rockets and
shells damaged or destroyed Gaza water towers and
pipelines, wells and sewage plants causing an
estimated $34m in damages. This further crippled the
delivery of safe, clean water, deepening the health
catastrophe here. An even greater impact comes
from Israel’s economic blockade, which Dr. Abu Samia
blames directly on the area’s growing malnutrition.</p>
<p>The severe shortages of water and electricity, along
with rising poverty, have damaged nutritional
levels, Dr. Abu Samia says.</p>
<p>“It is affecting babies.”</p>
<p>Before the siege, he said, he had no patients suffering
from malnutrition.</p>
<p>Now he frequently sees children with nutritional
disease.</p>
<p>“We are seeing babies with marasmus” – a
severe nutritional disease. “The last two years, it is
increasing more and more.”</p>
<p>Gazans well remember the cynical words of Israeli
minister Dov Weissglas in 2006, when he infamously
compared the blockade to “a meeting with a dietician …We
have to make them much thinner, but not enough to die.”</p>
<p><strong>Gaza to become uninhabitable by 2020</strong></p>
<p>Now, quite apart from the hundreds of deaths by
rockets, missiles and bullets in the three most recent
Gaza wars, children here are getting ill and dying from
bad water and the infectious diseases that result.</p>
<p>“Occupation and siege are the primary impediments to
the successful promotion of public health in the Gaza
Strip,” declared a 2018 study in the Lancet, which cited
“significant and deleterious effects to health care.”</p>
<p>Without a major intervention by the international
community, and soon, humanitarian groups warn Gaza will
become uninhabitable by 2020 – barely a year from now.</p>
<p>Failure to urgently intervene will result in “a huge
collapse”, says Adnan Abu Hasna, Gaza spokesperson for
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which
recently had all its US funding cut by the Trump
administration.</p>
<p>Otherwise, in less than two years, he says, “Gaza will
not be a liveable place.”</p>
<p>And yet, liveable or not, the vast majority of Gaza’s
two million people have nowhere else to go. Most are
simply trying to live as normal lives as possible under
extremely abnormal circumstances.</p>
<p>At dusk on a summer night, on a spit of rock and earth
in the middle of Gaza harbour, five of those two million
people try to enjoy a few minutes of quiet.</p>
<p>All around Ahmad and Rana Dilly and their three young
children, the harbour ripples with life. Fishermen haul
in their nets. Kids pose for selfies on broken concrete
blocks and rebar – remnants of an old bombing raid.</p>
<p>Rana pours mango soda; Ahmad insists on handing out
some chocolate wafers.</p>
<p>“You are with Palestinians,” he laughs, dismissing
those who reject his offer.</p>
<p>Their three young children nibble on chips.</p>
<p>The Dillys have the same problems as many Gaza
families.</p>
<p>Ahmad, a money changer, had to rebuild his shop in 2014
after an Israeli missile destroyed it.</p>
<p>Like most Gazans, the family has to contend with the
salty water from the taps and the inherent risks of
disease from the trucked water they rely on. But these
problems mean little to them compared with their wish to
feel safe and to enjoy fleeting moments of living like a
normal family.</p>
<p>“I know the situation is horrible, but I just want to
let my kids have a little change from time to time,”
Ahmad says. “I want them to see something different. I
want my family to feel safe.”</p>
<p>In the distance, an explosion echoes. Ahmad pauses for
a short moment, then ignores it.</p>
<p>He says, “I come here to the sea, and forget about all
the world.”</p>
<p><em>~ Al Jazeera/Days of Palestine</em></p>
<p><em><strong><br>
</strong></em></p>
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