" Public health nightmare!" Flesh eating bacteria sweeping across Syria

AL-SALAMA, Syria — A crowd gathers at the center of Bab al-Salam, a refugee camp on the Turkey-Syria border that is home to some 13,500 internally displaced Syrians. Children sit at their mothers' feet, playing with plastic toys in the melting mud. One boy's cheeks are pocked with small red dots; a boy next to him, wearing nothing but a diaper, has a large crusted lesion on his leg -- signs of an infectious skin disease that is spreading throughout Syria and the neighboring region.

Since war came to Syria a little more than two years ago, the country has been transformed into a public health nightmare. Gastroenteritis, which causes severe diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, is ubiquitous among displaced populations -- both inside and outside Syria -- and a measles epidemic is currently sweeping the northern portion of the country. (At least 7,000 cases of the disease have been detected since 2011, according to Doctors Without Borders.) An outbreak of water-borne diseases such as hepatitis, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery, meanwhile, is all but "inevitable," according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

more http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/19/syria_aleppo_evil_flesh_eating_disease