Battling outbreak of killer disease in refugee camp hell
A DOCTOR has spoken out about the harrowing conditions in a refugee camp after helping to battle a deadly outbreak of diphtheria among Rohingya Muslims.
Stephen Owens was part of the first ever deployment of Britain’s Emergency Medical Team (EMT) who travelled to Bangladesh during the New Year to help prevent an epidemic in the country.
As clinical lead for the second wave of British medical staff deployed to Cox’s Bazar, Dr Owens and his team provide immediate life-saving care to refugees at risk from the rapid outbreak of the disease.
Since returning to his work as a specialist paediatrician in infectious diseases and immunology at Newcastle’s Great North Children’s Hospital, Dr Owens has been sharing his experiences of life in Cox’s Bazar, which is home to thousands of Rohingya refugees who have fled violence in bordering Myanmar.
“The camp is something to behold - on the face of it, it looks like Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. “It’s about the size of Leicester and it’s built up organically so there’s all kinds of structures from brick buildings to just tents.
“It was very overcrowded - there were probably about a million people there when we were there and conditions were very basic with poor sanitation.
“There were people of all ages, from very young babies to elderly people, who had survived terrible military persecution on the Myanmar side of the border.
“We saw a lot of people with various disabilities and if we’d been asked to provide general care for those people it would have been overpowering, you just wouldn’t have known where to begin.
“But we were there for a specific reason, to help with diphtheria, which really helped.”
During their time at the camp, British medics heard stories of the horrendous suffering undergone by many of the refugees. The refugee camp and, right, Dr Stephen Owens. Below, Dr Owens on his rounds Dr Owens, who lives in Whitley Bay, said: “Any unmarried young girls or women who had babies in the recent past, many of them had been victims of sexual abuse by soldiers. “We would also hear stories of trafficking of children from within the camp - things that were really shocking but most of the time you just had to stay focused on the job.” The poor conditions in the camp meant infection was able to spread very quickly through vast numbers of people, with Dr Owens and his team seeing over 60 suspected cases of diphtheria every day. Left untreated, diphtheria can be fatal. It can cause severe breathing difficulties as well as longer-term brain, heart and kidney problems. Cases of diphtheria are extremely rare in the UK, as children are routinely vaccinated during early infancy to protect them from the bacterium. Many children in the area were completely unvaccinated, so there was a high chance the disease would spread quickly, and medical Dr Stephen Owens teams had to act fast. Dr Owens said: “Three dedicated diphtheria treatment centres were speciallyconstructed around the camp and resourced to provide continuous care for diphtheria patients, 24 hours a day.
“We screened more than 3,000 people suspected of having diphtheria and treated more than 500 cases, most of them children. Milder cases of diphtheria were treated with antibiotics, but more severe cases required diphtheria antitoxin.”
Their most tragic case was a sixyear-old girl who was treated and returned to her tent - only to come back several days later with serious heart and kidney problems.
Dr Owens said: “She needed intensive care, specialist drugs and dialysis but there was nothing like that available in the camp and sadly she died.
“Thankfully that was the only patient we lost in those six weeks but it did really knock everybody.”
The EMT spent six weeks triaging and treating patients in Cox’s Bazar, where the disease claimed nearly 40 lives.
With the outbreak now under control, local Bangladeshi health professionals working with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) carried on the British medical teams’ work to eliminate the disease from the camp.