The UN children's fund on Friday said thousands of moderately or severely malnourished children were among the Rohingya refugees who have arrived in Bangladesh fleeing from ethnic persecution in Myanmar.
UNICEF workers have examined 59,604 children among the 604,000 Rohingya refugees who have reached Bangladesh since August 25, Efe reports.
According to their findings, 1,970 of those children suffer from severe acute malnutrition and 7,000 from moderate acute malnutrition, said UNICEF spokesperson Marixie Mercado.
The organisation has set up 15 treatment and nutrition centres, including a mobile one, and six more are set to be established in a new 7,413-acre refugee camp called Kutupalong Extension.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has instructed the transfer of 1,700 recently-arrived refugees to Kutupalong Extension.
According to Mercado, almost 2,000 children with severe acute malnutrition have already been treated.
The spokesperson said that many children reach Bangladesh in an already malnourished state.
In the state of Rakhine in Myanmar, the rates of malnutrition in the cities of Maungdaw and Buthidaung, where most of the refugees hail from, were already higher than the emergency threshold before the new wave of violence broke out on August 25.
Since that date, the UNICEF has had to stop treating some 4,000 severely malnourished children in northern Rakhine due to lack of access.
However, World Food Programme, a UN agency with access to the region, said on Friday that Myanmar had permitted the agency to restart the distribution of food there after a period of two months.
--IANS
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