The worst floods in three decades to hit Nigeria's Borno state are stretching government and aid agency resources, causing long delays for medical aid amid warnings of waterborne disease. - REUTERS
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00:00In a camp for people displaced by floods in Nigeria's Borno state, Bintu Amadu is among
00:07hundreds of people who've been waiting for hours to see a doctor.
00:12Her son had diarrhoea.
00:16She says she's been waiting since yesterday to no avail.
00:23Overwhelmed aid agencies have warned of an outbreak of waterborne disease amid the region's
00:28worst flooding in three decades.
00:31Hundreds of thousands of people, like Amadu, have been forced into displacement camps
00:36without food and clean water.
00:39And that's stretching aid agency and government resources, exacerbating a critical humanitarian
00:46crisis.
00:47The demand is so massive, the needs are so massive.
00:49Mathias Homare, a field coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières, said that Borno residents
00:54were already struggling with malnutrition following years of a jihadist insurgency
00:59in the region.
01:01And that means their immunity was already suppressed.
01:05People are living out and about, they are exposed to the environment.
01:09So what do we see?
01:10A lot of waterborne diseases, diarrhoea, diarrhoeic diseases, you've got malaria, malaria is around
01:18with a lot of mosquitoes, people are not able to sleep on their mosquito nets.
01:23The floods, which have killed more than 30 people in Nigeria, started when a dam burst
01:28its walls.
01:30That's after heavy rainfall that has also caused floods in Cameroon, Chad, Mali and
01:35Niger.
01:36In the last two weeks of August, more than 1.5 million people were displaced across 12
01:42countries in Western Central Africa due to floods.
01:46That's according to the United Nations Humanitarian Office, which said around 465 people have
01:52been killed.
01:55Nigeria's government has separately warned of rising water levels in the country's largest
01:59rivers, which could cause floods in the oil-producing Niger Delta in the south.