A concerned Iraqi father gestures to a blister on his one-year-old daughter’s cheek, which is the result of a parasite infection that sandflies in her isolated village carried.
“It’s a skin disease, the ‘Baghdad boil’,” Najeh Farhan said of the pustule on Tiba’s mouth as the toddler played with a pacifier at their home in the drought-hit province of Al-Diwaniyah.
Like countless other children in Iraq a country battling the effects of war, entrenched poverty, water stress and a heating planet Tiba is sick but has no access to good health care.
“There is no medical centre, we have nothing,” Farhan, a father of seven, said of his small village of Al-Zuweiya.
Tiba has been suffering from cutaneous leishmaniasis, a disease that has been endemic in Iraq for many years.
The World Health Organization said that 8,000 illnesses have been reported in the nation by 2022.
However, it announced the first confirmed occurrence in what had previously been a “traditionally sand fly-free” district in northern Iraq this year, calling it a “surprising development”.
The UN agency has pointed to “inadequate access to medical treatment in remote areas” as a driver of the disease but a senior WHO official also highlighted the effects of climate change.
“The sandfly, like any other insect, thrives at a specific temperature and humidity level,” Wael Hatahit, the WHO’s acting representative in Iraq, told AFP.
He pointed to Iraq’s “temperature rise and the change in the water fall pattern” and said the northward spread of the disease the sandfly carries “cannot be explained unless there is climate change”.
