Traumatised Iraqi children lack needed care - U.N.

[Barrett808]

Source: Reuters

Traumatised Iraqi children lack needed care - U.N.
By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA, May 23 (Reuters) - Most Iraqi children have suffered trauma in the four years since U.S.-led forces invaded their country, and few are getting the help they need to cope, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

The U.N. children's agency UNICEF said insecurity in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq had closed schools and made clinics and hospitals hard to reach, causing immunisation rates to fall.

Only 30 percent of Iraqi children can access safe drinking water, with crumbling sanitation systems raising the threat of water-borne disease such as cholera, it said.

Iraq reported its first suspected cholera cases of 2007 last week and diarrhoea, the second-highest cause of child illness and death in the country, is also on the rise, UNICEF found.

Read more: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L23399215.htm

[babylonsister]

1. Those poor babies; something else to hang on the dim one. nt