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34 children die of malnourishment in South Sudan early September, UN says

Xinhua, September 22, 2015 Adjust font size:

Thirty-four children under five years of age have died from malnutrition in the civil protection site in South Sudan's Bentiu, Unity State, in the first week of September, a UN spokesman said here Monday.

"It adds that water and sanitation organizations are stepping up activities to address malnutrition and child mortality," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a daily news briefing, citing the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

"OCHA says that malnutrition remains a major concern across South Sudan, with about a quarter of a million children severely malnourished," he said.

Meanwhile, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme (WFP) recently launched a joint nutrition scale-up plan, which will see the agencies and their partners assist over 2 million people -- children, pregnant women and new mothers -- for the treatment and prevention of acute malnutrition until May of next year.

Following the recent fighting in central Unity State, the UN is housing 112,000 people in its protection of civilians' camp in Bentiu, the spokesman said.

Since the beginning of the year, some 60,000 South Sudanese have fled the country, mostly to Sudan, bringing the total South Sudanese who fled the country since December 2013 to some 555,000, while some 1.5 million are internally displaced in the country, reports said.

In June, the United Nations warned that 250,000 South Sudanese children are facing starvation due to military battles witnessed by the country since 2013.

South Sudan secured its independence in 2011. However, it plunged into violent clashes in December 2013 as fighting erupted between troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and defectors led by his former deputy Riek Machar.

The conflict soon became an all-out war, with violence taking on an ethnic flavor, pitting the president's Dinka tribe against Machar's ethnic faction.

The warfare left thousands of South Sudanese dead and forced around 1.9 million people to flee their homes. Enditem