Eight months since the flooding began, people in Unity State, northern South Sudan, continue to suffer, stuck in poor living conditions and are at risk for outbreaks of infectious and waterborne diseases. Spread across several makeshift camp sites, they face food insecurity, loss of income, malnutrition, and a lack of safe drinking water. An estimated 835,000 people have been affected, according to the United Nations. The UN reports that this is the worst flooding emergency in decades.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are running mobile clinics that visit camps in and around the Mayom region, Bentiu, and Rubkona, responding to malaria, malnutrition, and acute watery diarrhea. “Many people have been displaced, and they are squeezed to one area,” said mobile clinic team leader Sworo Scopas Duku. “There are many diarrhea cases and we think that is because they have a lack of clean water to drink.” To try and reduce the spread of disease, MSF teams built a sewage treatment plant in six days.
