As always, war brings hunger and disease

Michael Yudell is associate professor and director of the Program in Public Health Ethics and History at Drexel University. He leads "The Public's Health" blog, for which he wrote this post.

While havoc spreads across the Middle East - in Iraq, Syria, Israel, and Gaza - it is civilians who are bearing the brunt of new and long-standing conflicts. Last month in the news came the escalating war between Israel and Hamas. Shortly before that, it was the crumbling of Iraq as ISIS fighters struck near Baghdad. All the while, Syria's civil war and refugee crisis have fallen off the front pages. But the disaster and suffering in and around Syria are no less acute.

A recent study published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report calls attention to one aspect of the crisis that is quietly harming many of the 2.8 million refugees who have fled Syria. Led by CDC scientists, the study identifies chronic malnutrition in children in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. There, nearly 20 percent of children were chronically malnourished, and almost half were suffering from anemia, indicating a lack of iron in the diet.

In Lebanon, according to a May report from Amnesty International, a "severe shortfall in international support has left many Syrian refugees . . . unable to access crucial medical care." The situation is so grim that in some cases refugees have gone back to Syria to seek care.

For those still in Syria, the situation continues to worsen, particularly among women and children. A June report from the United Nations Population Fund paints a grim picture of the situation inside Syria. A crumbled public health infrastructure barely functions, violence against women is a significant concern. Women inside Syria cannot get emergency obstetric care.

Finally, it is no surprise that without a functioning public health system, vaccination rates in Syria have plummeted. Coverage for polio vaccine has fallen from 99 percent before the war to 52 percent today. In the wake of this public-health disaster, 36 Syrian children have been paralyzed by polio and many more adults and children are silent carriers.

The World Health Organization and UNICEF have just finished the first phase of a regional polio vaccination campaign, seeking to vaccinate 22 million kids under the age of 5 throughout the Middle East.

War inevitably has an awful public health impact - on the delivery of essential public health services; on the mental and physical health of survivors; and on the political, economic and cultural institutions that glue society together.

But don't close your eyes. Don't look away from the suffering in Syria, in Iraq, in Israel, and in Gaza. Let it burn into you. To what end, I do not know. But I do know that we shouldn't look away. We should do all that we can to call attention to the suffering and do what we can to alleviate it.

One thing you can do, if you can, is to donate to groups on the ground helping Syrian refugees. Here are just a few:

UNICEF (www.unicefusa.org)

United Nations Refugee Agency (www.unrefugees.org)

Save the Children (www.savethechildren.org)

International Rescue Committee (www.rescue.org)

Catholic Relief Services (http://crs.org)