NEW YORK -- More than two years after the Iraq war started, children continue to be its main victims as the health of the majority of the population continues to deteriorate. In the 1980s, Iraq had one of the best health-care systems in the region. Today it cannot respond to the most basic health needs of the population. In 1991, there were 1,800 health-care centers in Iraq. More than a decade later, barely half remain and almost one-third of those require major rehabilitation. U.N. Development Program's Human Development Index for the country has fallen from 96 to 127, one of the most dramatic declines in human welfare in recent history.
According to Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food, the rate of malnutrition among Iraqi children has almost doubled since Saddam Hussein's ouster in April 2003. Today, at 7.7 percent, Iraq's child malnutrition rate is roughly equal to that of Burundi, an African nation ravaged by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than the rates in Uganda and Haiti, countries also devastated by unrelenting violence.
The population health problems are dramatically different than those facing young Iraqis a generation ago, when obesity was one of the main nutrition-related public health concerns. High rates of malnutrition started in the 1990s as a result of the U.N.-imposed sanctions to punish the Hussein regime for invading Kuwait in 1990. But following the 2003 invasion by the "coalition" forces, the cycle of insurgent violence and occupation forces' counterattacks have significantly damaged the basic health infrastructure in the country.