Enabling Mobility of War Victims: Amputees in Yemen

Abstract

Conflict exerts substantial trauma on people’s lives and destabilizes the future wellbeing of survivors in multiple ways. The loss of a limb is one of the most severe outcomes of war. Loss of a limb impacts a person’s mobility, psychosocial well-being, economic self-sufficiency, and therefore integration into society creating a downward spiral for conflict survivors. With manual labor as a dominant source of income in most conflict-affected countries, amputees face poverty and other secondary health issues due to reduced mobility including high blood pressure, deterioration or onset of diabetes, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression making them vulnerable to addiction to substances and domestic violence [1,2,3]. Mortality risk is significantly higher for persons aged 40 years or older with blast, spine or vascular injury, and those with infections. Amputee rehabilitation is a component of the comprehensive set of rehabilitation efforts targeting people exposed to conflicts that are supported by KSReleif including demining, child soldier rehabilitation, enabling food and agriculture security, and infectious disease control efforts. Yemen’s protracted civil war deters reconstruction efforts and large-scale rehabilitation. Though the actual number of amputees in Yemen are unknown, with the beginning of conflict in Yemen in 2015, Yemen was added to the countries with the largest number of amputees along with Cambodia, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, and Uganda. In the first year of the Yemeni war alone, reports indicate that an estimated 6,000 people have been left disabled [3]. Despite the lack of a defined cessation of hostilities in Yemen, on July 15 2016 the KSrelief established the Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Program for Yemeni amputees, in view of the population level humanitarian impact, after executing many land mine removal projects to eliminate the rout cause of the problem [4,5,6]. In collaboration with KSrelief, the therapeutic Medicine Sector of Ministry of Health of Yemen (MOPHP) identified the following objectives for this joint intervention.

Keywords: War injuries, Conflict, Humanitarian support, Rehabilitation, Prosthetics