by William M. Reilly
UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 3 (Xinhua) -- A crush of some 4,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar over the past two days, crossing the border into Bangladesh, and malnourished children in refugee camps in Bangladesh are threatened with death, UN officials said Friday.
"The UN Office on the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that some 4,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar and crossed the border to Bangladesh in the last 48 hours," chief UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York.
"The newly-arrived refugees say that thousands more people are waiting on the coast of Myanmar to make the crossing," he said, of an inlet of the Bay of Bengal. "UN agencies and their partners are providing food and other supplies, as well as transportation to transit centers, to these refugees."
Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi made her first visit to Myanmar's northern Rakhine State since Aug. 25, the day on which the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army extremist terrorists launched fresh attacks on police outposts in Rakhine, displacing residents and causing humanitarian issues.
An estimated 1 million Rohingyas were living in northern Rakhine State of Myanmar, an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation.
Over last weekend, a new surge of refugees swelled the number of Rohingyas who have fled Myanmar since Aug. 25 to 607,000. But officials said earlier this week that the flow had slowed, only to up-tick later in the week to bring the total to about 611,000. Some 800,000 Rohingyas in all have fled Myanmar since 2012, according to UN officials.
The UN Children's Agency (UNICEF) expressed concern that 7.5 percent of children at the largest refugee camp of Kutupalong in Bangladesh were suffering from severe acute malnutrition, double the rate seen among Rohingya child refugees earlier this year, Dujarric said.
"The Rohingya children in the camp who have survived horrors in Myanmar's northern Rakhine State and a dangerous journey here are already caught up in a catastrophe," said UNICEF Bangladesh Representative Edouard Beigbeder in a UNICEF press release issued at its headquarters in New York on Friday. "Those with severe malnutrition are now at risk of dying from an entirely preventable and treatable cause."
"Malnutrition rates among children in northern Rakhine were already above emergency thresholds," said the UNICEF. "The condition of these children has further deteriorated due to the long journey across the border and the conditions in the camps."
The UN agency also said around 26,000 people now living in the Kutupalong camp are faced with an acute shortage of food and water, unsanitary conditions and high rates of diarrhea and respiratory infections. Cases of measles have been reported.
The Kutupalong nutrition assessment, conducted on Oct. 22-28, surveyed 405 households including families who arrived in Kutupalong both before and after Aug. 25, UNICEF said.
