Independent UK: Battle To Save Iraq's Children (Hospital Conditions Violation of Geneva Conventions)

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2165470.ece

The battle to save Iraq's children
Doctors issue plea to Tony Blair to end the scandal of medical shortages in the war zone
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
Published: 19 January 2007

The desperate plight of children who are dying in Iraqi hospitals for the lack of simple equipment that in some cases can cost as little as 95p is revealed today in a letter signed by nearly 100 eminent doctors.

They are backed by a group of international lawyers, who say the conditions in hospitals revealed in their letter amount to a breach of the Geneva conventions that require Britain and the US as occupying forces to protect human life. In a direct appeal to Tony Blair, the doctors describe desperate shortages causing "hundreds" of children to die in hospitals. The signatories include Iraqi doctors, British doctors who have worked in Iraqi hospitals, and leading UK consultants and GPs.

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"Sick or injured children who could otherwise be treated by simple means are left to die in hundreds because they do not have access to basic medicines or other resources," the doctors say. "Children who have lost hands, feet and limbs are left without prostheses. Children with grave psychological distress are left untreated," they add.

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Nicholas Wood, an architect who helped to organise the protest, said they had evidence on film of dead babies being dumped in cardboard boxes. "In one hospital, there were three babies to an incubator. The incubators are 36 years old and are held together by tape and a bit of wire. They are wrecks. They cost about £5,000 each, but that is nothing to compared to the cost of a missile," he said.

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* In the same hospital, a baby with a rare illness causing internal bleeding died due to lack of a phial of vitamin K, which would have cost less than £1.
* Up to 260,000 children may have died since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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