Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) says it has increased its medical support in Maiduguri, Borno State, after a sharp rise in child malnutrition cases overwhelmed its facilities in late August and early September.
In a statement released on Thursday obtained by The News Chronicle, MSF noted that while admissions have slightly dropped, the number of children in need of treatment is still very high.
Nigeria is facing a major humanitarian crisis in the northeast, with conflict, food shortages, and insecurity worsening conditions in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe (BAY) states.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), about 2.6 million children under five are projected to suffer from malnutrition in 2025, with one million at risk of severe acute malnutrition double last year’s figure.
MSF Project Coordinator, Daniela Batista, said their facilities were recently overwhelmed by both malnutrition and measles cases. “Our isolation units for measles patients quickly filled up, and even the extra space we created reached capacity. Those units are still about 70 percent full,” she explained.
To cope with the crisis, MSF nearly doubled the bed space at its Inpatient Therapeutic Feeding Centre at Nilefa Kiji Hospital in Maiduguri. By the third week of September, the centre was recording over 85 new admissions daily.
At its Shuwari extension facility, more than 3,200 malnourished children were treated between August and early September, while 1,500 others were referred for further care. Over 600 children were also treated for measles.
The organisation warned that shortages of therapeutic milk and ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) are making the situation worse, and some partner facilities can only accept referrals if MSF provides extra medical supplies.
MSF teams also reported that many patients are coming from Zabarmari, a nearby community they cannot currently reach due to security issues.
Discussions are ongoing with the Borno State Ministry of Health to support the local primary health centre there.
MSF said the crisis in Maiduguri reflects a wider trend across its nutrition centres in Kebbi, Sokoto, Kano, Katsina, and Bauchi.
The organisation called on authorities and humanitarian partners to urgently address shortages of supplies, strengthen health systems, and improve community-level care to prevent the situation from getting worse.
