Hunger amplifies infectious diseases for millions fleeing the violence of Boko Haram

Flying into Monguno, a recently "liberated" town in a forgotten corner of a forgotten state in northeastern Nigeria, all you can see is a vast expanse of nothingness. There is no horizon, just a haze of sand whipped up by the hot, harmattan winds blowing from the Sahara Desert. No green, except for the curious mossy splotches where groundwater rises to the surface. All else is dust. The only signs of farms are the faint outlines of what were once fields etched into the desiccated land. Every so often the charred remnants of a village come into view.

This is what scorched earth looks like, a legacy of more than 8 years of terror by the extremist group Boko Haram, which, until recently, held the region in a vice. The world began to wake up to the full horror of that legacy last year, as the Nigerian army started ousting the insurgents from their strongholds here in Borno and the two adjoining states of Yobe and Adamawa. As survivors began straggling out, the few humanitarian workers already on the ground were shocked at what they saw: millions sick and near starvation, fresh graves that hinted at an untold number of dead. "We started seeing the state of the people coming out and got a sense of what the magnitude of the crisis might be," says John Agbor, UNICEF's head of health for Nigeria in Abuja.

Exact numbers are hard to pin down, but across these three states 8.5 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. About 5.1 million are malnourished, half a million children so severely that without treatment 75,000 more will die by June, warns the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). About 1.8 million people have been internally displaced and are on the move, more than half of them children. In Borno, the hardest hit state, 1.2 million have crowded into the capital city of Maiduguri alone, doubling the population in a matter of months. https://youtu.be/yv0cYwrYhtk.

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