Wars threaten health of 600m women, children worldwide

Protracted and ‘messy’ wars mean more than 600 million women and children worldwide cannot receive essential healthcare, according to estimates published in The Lancet medical journal.

By 2019, the authors wrote, there were 54 “state-based armed conflicts” in 35 countries – wars that had lasted an average of two decades and presented a “growing threat to humanitarian access and the delivery of essential health services, affecting at least 630 million women and children”.

The research team, from nine institutions, including Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, estimated that by 2017, 10 per cent of the world’s women and 6 per cent of children “were either forcibly displaced or living dangerously close to conflict zones”.

From 2009 to 2017, the number of women and children displaced by fighting jumped from around 30 million to more than 50 million, with factors such as “population growth, more conflicts, increasing use of explosive and chemical weapons in urban areas” driving the rise.

Wars, the researchers said, are increasingly characterised by “a lack of respect for International Humanitarian Law” and tarnished by “the systematic use of explosive and chemical weapons in cities and pervasive sexual violence against women and girls”.

This, in turn, brings “new challenges to humanitarian access, the delivery of health services, and the protection of humanitarian workers and health facilities from attack”.

“It is clear that the indirect effects of armed conflict on women and children are far greater than the effects of actual fighting,” said co-author, Hala Ghattas, of the American University of Beirut. (dpa/NAN)