A recurrent crisis threatens the lives of hundreds of infants in the Gaza Strip with mental retardation and behavioral disorders such as depression, aggression, involuntary movements and other mental illnesses due to the lack of therapeutic milk (PKU) and the cessation of supply to the Ministry of Health. PKU; a rare genetic disease that leads to an imbalance in the digestion of an amino acid called phenylalanine.<\/p>\n
Due to this disease, sick babies cannot breastfeed natural milk because it causes severe mental retardation. eleven babies born annually out of a total of 110 cases registered in Gaza strip Ministry of health who need this special milk that does not contain phenylalanine to grow normally. The absence of this milk will result in mental retardation and permanent disability. After the first six months of a baby\u2019s life, he begins to eat other foods that do not contain phenylalanine.<\/p>\n
talking to the mother of two patients” Lian and Iman”, she said, “Our suffering started from the birth of my first child and the discovery of her illness six years ago, and then we felt the same disappointment when we had our second child; she is now eight months old”.<\/p>\n
“Doctors say the disease is chronic, and we cannot provide adequate alternative food such as fruits and vegetables permanently because of the bad economic situation. She added, “Iman” is my first child, she became more aggressive with her brothers and friends, and fail to match her peers in school when not receiving her therapeutic milk.<\/p>\n
For her part\u00a0 Dr. Angie Shaheen a doctor in Division of Child Health said that PUK milk is currently available in the market but expensive and most children cannot get them because of their high price. The Ministry of Health has issued several appearances to obtain this special therapeutic milk for these children. The ministry needs about 150 monthly packs per babies less than one-year-old and needs for 350 milk packs for babies older than one year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A recurrent crisis threatens the lives of hundreds of infants […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":92851,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[381,382,266,383],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-latest-news","category-c79-main-title","category-reports"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/56.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moh.gov.ps\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}