Dozens of displaced people in Syria’s Idlib province 'poisoned after consuming poorly stored food'

Dozens of people at the Al-Bashir displaced people’s camp in rebel-held northwestern Syria have been affected by poisoning after reportedly consuming poorly-stored food.

The Syrian Civil Defence, known as the White Helmets, said on Facebook on Tuesday that they had arranged treatment for 29 people for poisoning, most of them children.

Hafez Mustafa, an official at the camp, told The New Arab’s Arabic-language sister site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that a Turkish charity had distributed the food, which had not been refrigerated properly.

He said that over 50 people had suffered stomach pains as a result of consuming the food the following day.

Approximately 325 families live in the Al-Bashir camp, which is near the town of Kelali in the north of the rebel-held Syrian province of Idlib.

Mustafa said the camp did not have medical facilities, so those affected had to be transported to hospitals and clinics in Kelali.

He added that all those taken to hospitals had been discharged but some remained bed-ridden as a result of the poisoning.

Obada Thikra, a volunteer with the White Helmets, told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that incidents of food poisoning had become frequent at displaced people's camps in Idlib, saying that even "minimum health standards" of food preservation were not being implemented.

He added that this had become worse as a result of high summer temperatures, with meals being stored without refrigeration.

Last April, 20 residents of the Ben Sari displaced people’s camp in Idlib province were hospitalised after consuming poorly stored food.

Idlib province is currently home to approximately 4 million people, over half of them displaced from other parts of Syria as a result of the Syrian conflict, which broke out in 2011 following the Assad regime’s brutal repression of peaceful pro-democracy protests.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in displaced people’s camps with inadequate access to food, medicine, and other necessities.

A recent report by the White Helmets said that 38 percent of residents of displaced people’s camps were subsisting on one meal a day.