Public health alert in Samoa after four children die

Transcript

Samoa's Ministry of Health says four children have died and 19 have been left seriously ill this year due to malnutrition following diarrhoeal illnesses.

Dr Saine Vaai-Nielsen from the Ministry's surveillance team says she issued a public health alert to family doctors as the situation is much worse than in previous years.

Jenny Meyer asked her what she thinks is behind the problem.

SAINE VAAI-NIELSEN: Multiple factors really. It's a lot to do with practices of mothers with the feeding. The feeding of children with the age groups that we saw were the under five year olds. I believe its the usual sort of thing that we see with other Pacific Islands as well, the diarrhoea cases, its common in the under developed countries. So when we looked at some of the records again it's just poor nutrition, poor feeding, I suppose as well we saw records of some with congenital malformations, also with hygiene practices.

JENNY MEYER: Is there any concern about the safety of the drinking water say if people are, say for example not breast feeding or if they are giving formula and mixing it up with unsafe drinking water, do you think that is a problem in any of these cases.

SVN: Yes it could be in some of the cases because some of the water is actually not treated, so that would be definitely one of the other reasons. When children go off their mothers' breast milk they are then put on substitute milk like formula or other milk that's available in the stores, readily available, so they are just put on those instead of looking at good nutrition for the babies at that age.

JM: There have been a number of babies that have died in fact I understand and many more who have become seriously unwell as result of these gastroenteritis illnesses, they haven't managed to cope, what are you hoping to achieve with the public health alert, what are you wanting people to do?

SVN: With this alert, it went out to the doctors. Well we need to see what evidence there is of what bugs there may be, that it could be viruses, it could be bacterial or chemical. So we wanted to get evidence of what is going on from lab testing and stuff. But also that the health sector should really re-look at the practices of oral rehydration for these children and also very importantly the nutritional requirements, the diets of these children who come in, that's with the clinical side. Also with the Ministry of Health we do look at the breast feeding, and also for food and water safety, and hand hygiene awareness.

Dr Saine Vaai-Nielsen says the Ministry was alerted to the outbreak after a recent doctors meeting and it appears the cases are mainly around Apia.