The medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is witnessing alarming indications of a deadly and escalating nutritional crisis in Ethiopia’s Afar region, requiring an urgent scale up of the humanitarian response. In Afar, hundreds of thousands of people have fled from recent conflict only to find themselves grappling alongside host communities with drought, hunger and staggering lack of access to healthcare and clean water.

Since April, MSF has been increasing its support to Dupti Hospital, which serves a population of more than 1.1 million people including hundreds of thousands of displaced people. This year, the number of severely malnourished children admitted to the facility has already exceeded the previous year’s baseline by a factor of three to four. Patient mortality rates are staggeringly high, exceeding twenty percent in some weeks. Thirty-five children have died in the last eight weeks alone and more than two thirds of those patients died within 48 hours of admission.