Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it has performed more than 14,000 surgeries and provided more than 8,000 mental health consultations in Maroua, Cameroon, since 2016.
MSF said in a report, titled, Five Years in Maroua: Essential Care in an Ongoing Crisis, that services provided by its teams included emergency trauma surgery and long-term surgical and rehabilitative care.
The report noted that health needs in the Far North region of Cameroon, part of the Lake Chad Basin, remain significant.
The Lake Chad crisis began in Nigeria in 2009, before spreading throughout the Lake Chad Basin, western Chad and southeast Niger.
The crisis is a complex humanitarian emergency precipitated by climate change, extreme poverty and cross-border conflict.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 298,225 Nigerian refugees have fled to Chad, Cameroon and Niger.
The UN agency also noted that an estimated 2,832,939 people have been forced from their homes across Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger as a result of the crisis. These people have been left at risk of extreme violence and with insufficient access to health care.
The Maroua regional hospital, where MSF provides emergency surgical care and mental health care, is the main specialist health centre in the region.
‘Since March 2015, MSF has been assisting refugees and people displaced by conflict in the Lake Chad region, as well as host communities made vulnerable by the violence’, the report said.
‘In 2021, the impact of the crisis is still visible both on the displaced populations and on host populations’.
MSF teams, according to the report, treat patients suffering from complicated fractures, serious soft tissue and abdominal infections, severe burns, and those in need of emergency surgical care.
‘Attacks were happening every day’, the report quoted 24-year-old Ibrahim Abdulahi, as saying.
Abdulahi fled Nigeria to escape armed groups. He lost several brothers and his mother in an attack, according to MSF.
‘I am constantly on edge; when someone shuts a door I think it is a weapon. I [cannot] be with people; I [cannot] sleep. I have lost many brothers, my mother too, all in attacks… It disturbed me, I [could not] even sleep. I was sent here to MSF’, the report read.
A nurse working with MSF, Gaëlle Ngacha, said, ‘At the start of the project, MSF’s main objective was to treat victims of armed groups who came from remote areas and were transferred to Maroua.
‘That was the idea. But after a while, we started to receive a lot of injured people from the city of Maroua. People came with life-threatening emergencies that had to be managed.
‘Immediately, MSF began to take care of these cases; both those who had been injured in conflict and other vital emergencies’.
MSF, the report noted, has launched new projects in the nearby areas of Mora and Kolofata to meet health needs in the Far North region.
Source: MSF
Photo source: MSF
