美国国家公共电台 NPR Rare Disease Finds Fertile Ground In Rohingya Refugee Camps

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Rare Disease Finds Fertile Ground In Rohingya Refugee Camps

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A diptheria outbreak is worsening in Bangladesh in what's rapidly become the largest refugee camp in the world. The camp is home to some of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people who fled Myanmar since August last year.

NPR's Jason Beaubien reports.

(SOUNDBITE OF BABY CRYING )

JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE¹: The waiting room at the Samaritan's Purse Diptheria Treatment Center in the Balukhali refugee camp is packed. The room isn't really a room. It's just some benches under a tarp awning².

ANDY DOYLE: Yesterday was a very busy day for us. We saw 117 patients came in to be screened. That's the most we've seen in any given day.

BEAUBIEN: Dr. Andy Doyle is the medical director for this tented field hospital. This facility only treats diptheria, an airborne bacterial³ infection that can be fatal. So the very first thing the staff members do is make sure the patient really has diptheria and not just a bad cold.

DOYLE: It's not something we see in the West. Or most of us - all of us from the West that are working here never saw this disease until we got here a week or two ago, and now we're experts on it.

BEAUBIEN: It's not seen in the West because almost everyone is vaccinated⁴ against it. Doyle says diptheria turns out to be pretty easy to identify. The patients have high fever or a sore throat, often a runny nose and a severe inflammation in the back of their throat.

DOYLE: Sometimes they get swelling⁵ in their necks, especially in the younger children. And their neck itself will get really big. It's called a bull neck. And those are the signs that the airway⁶ is in impending⁷ danger, and that's what we look for.

BEAUBIEN: And that's how diptheria kills. The person's throat swells⁸ up, and eventually they can't breathe. As of the middle of January, there've been nearly 5,000 reported cases of diptheria in these camps and 33 deaths. The refugees are packed together in makeshift shelters. Toilets and water wells have been randomly⁹ dug all over the camps, often side by side. The poor sanitation¹⁰ in the camps plus the extremely low vaccination¹¹ rates among the Rohingya have allowed the disease to flourish. Diptheria can often be treated with antibiotics¹². But if the person's airway is in danger of being blocked, they're given an antitoxin via an intravenous drip. The treatment has the potential to spark a fatal reaction.

DOYLE: For the entire administration of the medication, which can take anywhere from four to six hours, that nurse will sit at that bedside the whole time monitoring, watching for the slightest hint. And they've gotten really good at picking up the very subtle signs that an allergic¹³ reaction's about to start.

BEAUBIEN: In a ward¹⁴ in a big, white tent behind the reception area, Nur Aysia Begum is on hour No. 2 of the treatment. She's one of the more than 650,000 Rohingya refugees who arrived in this camp over the last five months to escape what the U.N. has called a campaign of ethnic¹⁵ cleansing¹⁶ by the Myanmar military. Her mother, Nayna Khatun, says they feared they'd be killed by the soldiers if they stayed. Now their family of seven lives in a small bamboo and plastic shelter and relies on international food aid to survive.

NAYNA KHATUN: (Foreign language spoken).

BEAUBIEN: When her daughter got sick, Khatun says she was worried because she didn't have any money to pay for a doctor or medicine. All of the treatment, however, at this Samaritan's Purse clinic is free. Marcella Kraay, a project coordinator¹⁷ with Doctors Without Borders, says this refugee situation is extreme in many ways.

MARCELLA KRAAY: We've had a big measles¹⁸ outbreak, and we've also had the biggest diphtheria outbreak in - you know, that the world has seen in a long time.

BEAUBIEN: Kraay says back in Myanmar, the Rohingya lacked access to even the most basic immunizations.

KRAAY: What we can see is that the refugee population - specifically the Rohingya - had very little access to health care.

BEAUBIEN: Humanitarian¹⁹ groups have launched a massive campaign to try to immunize nearly a million people in and around the refugee camps against diptheria and other vaccine-preventable diseases. But it will take several rounds of these immunizations before the Rohingya will have adequate protection against diptheria.

Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.