"Deplorable" situation in Bentiu camp behind jump in hepatitis E cases

The situation is critical with two deaths already registered within a month, since the end of July.

“We have repeatedly warned of the health risks of inadequate water and sanitation service provision in the Bentiu camp,” says Federica Franco, Head of MSF in South Sudan.

“A failure to address these issues, with agencies actually reducing their water and sanitation services over the past year, has now resulted in this avoidable situation.”

Risk to pregnant women

Of 186 hepatitis E cases reported in 2021, over 60 percent were recorded over six weeks between July to mid-August.

One patient who passed away was a pregnant woman, according to the Ministry of Health in South Sudan. Pregnant women are especially at risk, as they are more likely to experience severe illness and the mortality rate can be as high as 10-30 percent. 

“The deplorable water and sanitation situation in the Bentiu camp is not a new phenomenon but has continued to drastically deteriorate in the last two years, leaving an already vulnerable population at high risk of outbreaks”

Samreen Hussain

|MSF deputy medical coordinator

MSF teams have also witnessed an exponential growth in the number of people with acute watery diarrhoea. While we were treating an average of 230 patients per month throughout the year, we have seen 1,454 in July – a 50 percent rise in the number of patients seen in June. The most affected are children aged under five years old.

“We don’t have water containers in our house and sometimes my children go to bed without showering because the one jerry can we have is not enough for showering the five of us. We just use it for drinking,” says camp resident Nyaker Deng Bol, 24 years old.

Listen to “Voices from Bentiu”, an episode of the MSF podcast Everyday Emergency

Water and sanitation

A lack of soap and latrines, as well as open sewers, are among the poor hygiene issues contributing to the appalling situation for over 100,000 people who live in the camp.

During a survey MSF teams conducted in August, less than 27 percent of the sampled households could show a piece of soap while being interviewed in their shelters. Additionally, only around 13 percent of people have access to hand washing points with water and soap close to the latrines.

An earlier MSF assessment in April showed that the number of functional latrines in the camp was ten times below the minimum international standard for the size of population. 

“The deplorable water and sanitation situation in the Bentiu camp is not a new phenomenon but has continued to drastically deteriorate in the last two years, leaving an already vulnerable population at high risk of outbreaks, as we are currently witnessing,” says Samreen Hussain, MSF deputy medical coordinator.

MSF in South Sudan