O/T, as Jeff has been compassionate about an occasional update on our Kosovar Aid project. Read the description of the coming misery and if you have any desire to contribute and know that every cent of your tax-deductible contribution will be hand-delivered to the only Albanian Organization spending a hundred percent of our contributions on the needs of the refugees, please let me know.
THE LONDON TIMES, May 31 1999
BALKANS WAR: REFUGEES
Doctors fear panic among refugees, writes
Daniel McGrory in Cegrane
Camp diseases incubate in sun
NATO pilots pray for clear skies for their
raids but doctors working with Kosovo's
refugees fear that hotter weather will cause
the overcrowded camps to be gripped by a
serious epidemic.
At Cegrane, the biggest camp in Macedonia,
doctors were building wards yesterday
where refugees showing signs of contagious
disease will be isolated from the sprawl of
tents that cover half this hilltop village.
Medical staff have already dealt with cases
of meningitis and dysentery but prefer not to
divulge this for fear of causing panic.
The summer temperature at Cegrane
regularly tops 45C and Tim Chen of
Médecins sans Frontières said: "This place
is an incubator for disease. If cholera or
hepatitis A catch hold they could spread
like wildfire."
For now, doctors are struggling with less
serious contagious diseases, mainly among
Cegrane's children. In the past week more
than 750 have caught head lice and 250 are
suffering from scabies. Those figures are
officially described as grossly
conservative.
"In truth, we are so run off our feet with the
people we see at our clinics we don't know
what is truly going on deep inside the
camp," Dr Chen said.
Every few minutes stretcherbearers struggle
into the clinic with another patient. "Most
have just collapsed in the heat and this is
just the beginning. What will high summer
be like?" Dr Chen said. His eight staff had
to deal with 800 people yesterday. "That is
a normal day for us," he said.
To stem the outbreak of head lice, parents
queued in the midday sun to pay to have
their children's heads shaved by barbers
from Cegrane who worked without pause.
A local volunteer doctor, Arben Taravari,
shows the pathetically few bottles of
treatment shampoo he has in his fridge. "We
already have serious skin epidemics and the
summer heat will make this so much worse.
It may be hard for any refugee family to
escape being touched by it. What should be
easily treatable is made disastrous by the
lack of drugs and the difficulty of reaching
everyone."
Temperatures inside the tents are hotter than
outside but the camp has been built on
jagged rock and there is nowhere for
refugees to sit in comfort. With more than
37,000 crammed inside the Cegrane camp,
the handful of volunteer staff from medical
charities cannot even begin to visit tents to
check on the condition of the most elderly
and frail.
There is no shade and as the camp is built
on an old landfill site, engineers are finding
it hard to deliver enough clean drinking
water. Some of the water is meant only for
washing. Children do not know that and
drink greedily from taps. To cool off they
play in a river heavily polluted with
effluent.
__________________________
Raven
K_refugees@hotmail.com
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