Feature: Medicines Without Borders provides healthcare to Dhaka slum community

Since April 2010, the Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF) or Medicines Without Borders, has been providing free healthcare to thousands of slum dwellers, which the MSF prefers to call "urban survivors" in Kamrangichar, the biggest slum community in this capital city.

The MSF is a European-based non-government organization that provides medical care and treatment to poor and impoverished individuals, mostly in Third World countries.

Kamrangichar, a peninsula covering 3.68 square km on the bank of the extremely polluted Buriganga River is home to some 400,000 "urban survivors". It was a former dump for Dhaka's trash.

Toxic waste from industries in Dhaka and Kamrangirchar is released into the Buringanga River, where many people from Kamrangirchar bathe and wash their clothes.

Dhaka, a city of over 15.2 million people, has some 5,000 slum areas.

Although Kamrangirchar is inside the Dhaka metropolitan area, it was only this year that it was included in Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) but had no health facility before April 2010 when MSF put up a primary health center and a therapeutic feeding center in the area.

Every day, the two centers receive some 200 patients who suffer from severe malnutrition, diarrhea and some kinds of skin disease, which are mainly caused by dirty drinking water and poor living conditions.

"Kamrangirchar is a place which is surrounded by the Buriganga River. When we made a survey in 2009, we found that the place had no health facility, so we decided to start our mission here," MSF program coordinator Phillip Jinah Aruna said. Aruna, a Sierra Leonean, who has been with the MSF since 1996.

Through a therapeutic feeding program, the MSF provides special support to severely malnourished children and their mothers in Kamrangirchar.

Available data show that two thirds of the deaths of children who are under five years old in Bangladesh are caused by malnutrition. But much of the local population is so accustomed to malnutrition that they do not consider this as a problem.

"If you have poor nutrition, you are often at high risk of getting infection, because your immune system does not work," Sonia Kalsvik, a Norwegian midwife working in MSF's Kamrangirchar healthcare centre, said.

Kalsvik said there is a need for people to recognize that malnutrition is a serious problem because this often results in major complications such as malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea.