Malnutrition brings a terrible disease to children in Niger

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Most African countries have faced noma disease, like Laos in Asia and some South American nations, but Niger accounts for a large part of the 140,000 to 180,000 people infected every year worldwide (AFP Photo/Issouf Sanogo)
Zinder (Niger) (AFP) – Mourdja’s nose has been eaten away, like one lip and part of her upper gum, leaving the 13-year-old girl atrociously disfigured by noma, a disease that thrives on malnutrition.
“It was better before,” the teenager says shyly and simply in the arid heartland of Niger, one of the world’s poorest nations, clearly ill at ease and fiddling with her bracelets.
Mourdja can no longer look people in the eye, her face ravaged by the polymicrobial infection, which began by making her inflamed gums bleed. Just three days later, rapid tissue damage stole her beauty — along with her childhood.
“The problem is that this is a very fast-acting disease,” says nurse Fati Badamasi, who works for the Swiss NGO Sentinelles, active in Niger since 1992.
“The necrosis takes hold in 72 hours. If the patient comes to us with a blackish patch (on the face) it’s already too late.”
Ali Adah, who oversees the charity’s work in the country on the southern edge of the Sahara, speaks of the fearful stench of noma, which “smells of decay, like a corpse”.
“When I come to the office and we have a new case, I smell it straight away,” he says.
– ‘Disease born of poverty’ –
Mourdja’s flesh gave off that odour after she caught the infection sometimes called oro-facial gangrene, which can break out where food is short and lacks key vitamins and water is polluted.
Noma also strikes when natural immunity is at its lowest.
Noma disease strikes when natural immunity is at its lowest (AFP Photo:Issouf Sanogo)
The teenager comes from a “very poor” family in the central Tahoua province, …Read More

Source:: PM Newspaper