UN says quarter of Rohingya refugee children ‘acutely malnourished’

A quarter of Rohingya children under the age of five who fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar suffer from potentially life-threatening levels of malnutrition, the UN children’s agency warned Friday. It said that three health and nutrition surveys conducted between October 22 and November 27 showed up to 25 percent of the young children crammed into Bangladeshi refugee camps have acute malnutrition, among other maladies, AFP reports. More than 655,000 people from the Rohingya minority Muslim community are reported to have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state since late August during military operations that the UN has described as ethnic cleansing.