@DuskyBlueDepartingLight
So I’ve just been reading up on Richard Kemp to see why he would deny that children are dying of malnutrition in Gaza.
So he doesn’t hold with women serving in forces, he thinks 16 is a good age to join the army, he served in Derry during the troubles- he was against the Bloody Sunday enquiry, he’s been called out for calling Catholic “taigs”, and the Jewish news were successfully sued after he wrote an article saying Baroness Warri was an apologist for Islamic state. That’s just his politics- there is nothing in his biography to indicate that he is any way trained to interpret famine related data .
One of the difficulties with declaring a famine is that it requires a certain data set
and secondly it tends to be declared too late to intervene. . A warning system has been developed by the leading humanitarian agencies- it’s called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). According to an editorial in the Lancet, one if the top 5 medical journals in the world, “Application of the scale in Gaza concluded that Gaza was above IPC Acute Food Insecurity Phase V (Catastrophe) thresholds.”
Todays NY times explains that using this system, a famine is identified in an area on the basis of three conditions:
- At least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food.
- At least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition.
- At least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition.
It’s not possible to do household surveys or arm circumference in a conflict zone.Who is going to map the area in a grid, and then train up health workers to systematically survey household and measure the babies arepa with paper bands?
The Lancet article references Nobel prize winner Amarta Sen”Existing economic systems allow some people to be entitled to food, while others are allowed to starve.This is often the case in conflict zones, where those with means might be able to barter until food aid arrives or they are able to leave the conflict zone. As a result, the most vulnerable, such as pregnant and lactating women and their babies, suffer the greatest burden in terms of morbidity and mortality.”