A Picture and its Story: Recovering from severe malnutrition in Yemen
Smiling and sitting down to bread and milk with her family, Yemeni teenager Saida Ahmed Baghili is barely recognisable a year on from the photo of her emaciated frame that came to symbolise the country's humanitarian crisis. Baghili now weighs 36kg (80 lb), according to her father, more than triple the 11kg she weighed last October when Reuters first met her at the al-Thawra hospital in Sana'a, where she was undergoing treatment for severe malnutrition. There the 19-year-old was unable to talk, let alone carry her ghostly, skeletal frame, which is now stronger after weeks of specialist care and time at home. "Saida's body got better because she's eating better, but she's still having trouble swallowing," her father Ahmed Baghili said at their home in Hodeidah this month. "She can only eat milk, biscuits and juice." Baghili's plight reflects that of many families in the Arabian Peninsula's poorest country, where a two-and-a-half-year war between a Saudi-led Arab coalition and the Iran-allied Houthi movement has claimed 10,000 lives. A quarter of the 28 million population are starving, according to the United Nations, with half a million children under the age of 5 severely malnourished and at least 2,135 people killed by cholera. REUTERS/Abduljabbar Zeyad SEARCH "ZEYAD BAGHILI" FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH "WIDER IMAGE" FOR ALL STORIES. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY. Matching text: YEMEN-SECURITY/MALNUTRITION