NYT A Somali hospital ward packed with gasping children shows how war, climate and mistrust of vaccines is fueling the disease’s return. Qurraisha Mukhtar’s two youngest children fell sick in early September, with a fever, cough and short gasping breaths. Their throats turned white, their necks swelled. She asked a healer in the neighborhood for a remedy, but 1-year-old Salman’s struggle for air grew much worse one night and he died. The next day, Hassan, 2, began to choke, and he died, too.
Ms. Mukhtar, who lives with her family in a stick-and-tin shack on the edge of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, could not sit and grieve, because two more of her children began to show signs of the same illness. She and her husband appealed to friends and relatives and scraped together the money to take them to a hospital in a three-wheeled taxi.