Syria: Death from Assad’s Chlorine

[Blue_Tires]

2.

Bad Chlorine

Though barely recognizable after four years of one of the worst conflicts since World War II, Syria used to be a middle-income country. For decades, chlorine was routinely used for safe water, sanitation, and the manufacture of medicines for both domestic consumption and export. But for several years before the beginning of the popular uprising in March 2011, and in part contributing to it, the Syrian government denied many public health measures to areas of the country that were politically unsympathetic to it, selectively withholding not only chlorine for treatment of water contaminated by sewage, but also routine childhood vaccinations. That continues today, with widespread denial of chlorine to Deir Ezzor, Raqqa, Daraa, the outskirts of Damascus, and other areas outside government control. A few drops of bleach would be sufficient to disinfect water and hands, but it is simply unattainable. In besieged areas, such as Ghouta, water is frequently cut off altogether as a punitive measure.

The consequences of this deprivation are magnified by mass displacement, with ten million civilians having been forced to flee their homes, often leaving three or four families together in households of appalling and unhygienic conditions. 642,000 Syrians live under siege, in even worse conditions. Myiasis—a maggot-ridden wound infection associated with lack of water—appeared in Ghouta last year, at the same time as a water cutoff. In Deir Ezzor, untreated tap water comes directly from the Euphrates River, two hundred yards downstream from a sewage pipe. As a result, there were more than 30,000 cases of hepatitis A across the country in 2014, with several fatalities in young children. This disease is rarely seen in the US, and hardly ever in fatal form.

On February 24 of this year, WHO issued an alert on the risk of cholera in Syria, a concern heightened by the sudden outbreak in Hama in mid-March of more than five hundred cases of acute watery diarrhea. The combination of inadequate surveillance, the absence of laboratories to test for cholera, and previous cover-ups by the Syrian Ministry of Health of cholera in 2005 and 2009 and polio in 2013 suggests that cholera may indeed be back. Even my colleagues in Damascus, where most water is still chlorinated, have suffered from hepatitis; others have succumbed to typhoid. Typhoid is now endemic in southeastern Deir Ezzor—the same area where polio first reappeared in 2013.

The governorate of Daraa has just reported more than two hundred cases of hand, foot, and mouth disease, which spreads easily to children exposed to unchlorinated water that has been contaminated by the stool of an infected child. Scabies and lice are everywhere. Many other water-related diseases, such as polio, giardia, schistosomiasis, and Legionella, are difficult to diagnose and treat without specialist doctors, well-equipped health facilities to collect blood, stool, skin, and urine samples, and labs for isolation of the pathogen—most of which the Syrian government has destroyed in opposition-held areas.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/may/07/syria-death-assads-chlorine/

[Wilms]

1. This is like what the US did to Iraq with sanctions.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/iraqi-sanctions-american-intentions-blameless-carnage-part-1/

• A January 22, 1991, Defense Intelligence Agency report titled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” noted,

Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline…. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease…. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.

• The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated in early 1991 that “it probably will take at least six months (to June 1991) before the [Iraqi water treatment] system is fully degraded” from the bombing during the Gulf War and the UN sanctions.

• A May 1991 Pentagon analysis entitled “Status of Disease at Refugee Camps,” noted,

Cholera and measles have emerged at refugee camps. Further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation.

• A June 1991 Pentagon analysis noted that infectious disease rates had increased since the Gulf War and warned, “The Iraqi regime will continue to exploit disease incidence data for its own political purposes.”

George Washington University professor Thomas Nagy, who marshaled the preceding reports in an analysis in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive, concluded, The United States knew it had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality. And it was more concerned about the public relations nightmare for Washington than the actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent Iraqis.
Pentagon intent

A Washington Post analysis published on June 23, 1991, noted that Pentagon officials admitted that, rather than concentrating solely on military targets, the U.S. bombing campaign “sought to achieve some of their military objectives in the Persian Gulf War by disabling Iraqi society at large” and “deliberately did great harm to Iraq’s ability to support itself as an industrial society.”

The bombing campaign targeted Iraq’s electrical power system, thereby destroying the country’s ability to operate its water-treatment plants. One Pentagon official who helped plan the bombing campaign observed,

People say, “You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.” Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.

[JayhawkSD]

2. Inaccuracies abound...

"A few drops of bleach would be sufficient to disinfect water and hands, but it is simply unattainable."
I think the writer means "unobtainable." One "attains" a personal goal, while one "obtains" a product.

"...the beginning of the popular uprising in March 2011"
The beginning of the Syrian Civil War cannot accurately be described simply as a popular uprising against Assad. It had its roots in the "Arab Spring" revolutions, which were more about economic deprivation than about leadership. The Syrian revolt began in the poor areas of Syria, where economic hardship was exacerbated by the influx of Iraqi refugees, and it had far more to do with economic conditions than it had to do with politics or ideology. So it was not against Assad, so much as it was a demand for better economic opportunity.