One Million People Have Been Wounded In Syrian Civil War Since 2011
As the militants of ISIS continue to takeover large swathes of territory in Syria, a recent report has revealed that an estimated one million people have been wounded since 2011 as a result of the civil war which has plagued the country.
Syria’s World Health Organization made a statement today, confirming that an estimated 200,000 people have also been killed during the ongoing war.
Elizabeth Hoff, WHO’s Syria representative, told Reuters, “In Syria, they have a million people injured as a direct result of the war. You can see it in the country when you travel around. You see a lot of amputees. This is the biggest problem.”
Another issue, as a result of the conflict, is that of infectious diseases, which have caused the deaths of many in the war-torn country, where half the hospitals are closed. According to Hoff, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government is also preventing aid convoys with medical supplies from crossing into some of the hardest-hit areas.
To compound things even further, vaccinations, which are key to preventing diseases from spreading among thousands of children, have now been infected with preventable maladies such as typhoid, measles, and even polio, due to the lack of medical care.
In 2014 alone, around 6,500 Syrian children were diagnosed with typhoid, 4,200 suffered from measles, and Syrian aid workers in Damascus said that tuberculosis was also spreading in the capital due to poor sanitary conditions and a government siege, according to a Reuters report.
All those deaths came even though WHO delivered more than 13.5 million treatments of lifesaving medicines and medical supplies in 2014, Hoff said — three times the amount distributed in 2013.
Nevertheless, as Hoff emphasized, not enough has been done to stop the infectious disease crisis, which stems from both the lack of medical care and the general breakdown of urban infrastructure and basic sanitary conditions in Syria.
