“There are so many traumatic injuries, such as broken explosion and bones wounds,” says Fitzpatrick, assistant professor at Friedman School of Nutrition of Tufts University. “But they are not healing, because people don’t have nutrients to build the collagen necessary to close them. So the wounds that are a month, even two months, still seem fresh as if they had occurred in the last week.”
According to the Ministry of Health managed by Hamas in Gaza, the deaths of malnutrition in the area since October 2023 reached 154, with 89 of the victims coming in children. World Health Organization reported this week That July witnessed a particular peak death, with 63 victims related to malnutrition reported in health facilities, including 38 adults, one in five and 24 children under five years. Most of these patients were declared dead on arrival.
The extent of this crisis has been transmitted to the world of observation through photos of children and infants blooded with branching hair. Fitzpatrick, who studies hunger and its biological effects, explains that in conditions of extreme scarcity, the body has an integrated prioritization system, designed to preserve the most vital organs, the heart and the brain, until the end. After using its primary fuel supplies – glycogen stored in the liver and muscles, it says that the body uses fat for energy, before degrading the bone, muscle and therefore, if necessary, the most resilient organs such as the liver to extract the protein. “The skin and hair are the first to be neglected,” says Fitzpatrick. “The hair will simply fall. Many times it will change the color. The skin becomes very thin.”
In some cases, a serious deficiency of protein can cause a condition known as Kwashihorkor, or edema of the famine, characterized by swelling due to the fluid that moves in the body’s tissues, in particular in the abdomen. “There are different types of acute malnutrition,” says Fitzpatrick. “There is the thin type and there is the Kwashiorkor, and we both see in Gaza. In children, you could see it in the face. Their cheeks become swollen and you are like, ‘Oh, they are going well.’ But no, it’s fluid. “
Most of our understanding of acute malnutrition comes from the studies conducted Survivors to the Holocaustmain famines of the 20th century like the Great Chinese famine and the Ethiopian famine of the 80s and anorexia. Marko Kerac, associate professor of health and global nutrition at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, describes the body as if entering a progressive liquidation process in which for a period, people are malnourished but still medical, before entering a much more serious phase characterized by the loss of appetite, lethargy and apathy or anxiety.
On the basis of Gaza’s latest reports, with those who describe almost one out of five children under the age of five is sharply malnourished, Kerac says that more and more people are entering this last phase. The statistics collected by the NGO, the global nutritional cluster, show an increase in cases since the beginning of June, with over 5,000 under the prices admitted to the four Gaza malnutrition treatment centers this month and 6,500 in June. “Younger children are more vulnerable because their organs are still developing,” says Kerac.