Geneva - The United Nations appealed on Tuesday for $35-million (about R260-million) to provide food and other urgent supplies for a tide of Somali refugees fleeing violence and pouring into Kenya.
About 34 000 have entered Kenya so far this year and the influx could reach 80 000 by year-end, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement.
In all, 160 000 Somalis are living in three refugee camps in Dadaab in northeastern Kenya and 22 percent of the children under age five among them suffer acute malnutrition, it said.
"Priority needs are health, nutrition and protection assistance, and transporting refugees from the border points to the camps," OCHA spokesperson Elisabeth Byrs told a briefing.
Somalis escaping drought, Islamist rule and the possibility of war have arrived in Kenya with tales of violence and hardship amid a stand-off between the Western-backed government and rival Islamists who control Mogadishu and parts of the south.
A three-year-old Somali refugee girl was diagnosed with polio last Friday - Kenya's first case since 1984, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), another UN agency.
"The Kenya case was imported from Somalia, which shows the importance of concentrating on cross-border vaccination campaigns," said WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib.
Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia are vaccinating nearly three million children against polio in a bid to stamp out the paralysing disease which has re-emerged in the Horn of Africa region after spreading from Nigeria via Yemen. The second of three immunisation campaigns is planned in early November.
Polio-free for almost three years, Somalia has reported 215 cases since being re-infected last year.
The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said 14 000 Somalis have crossed into Kenya since September 1. It said some refugees in the Dadaab camps have "tried to cheat the system by registering twice so that they can get extra ration cards".
This had led the UNHCR to suspend its operations at the Somali-Kenya border for the last few days to set up a more efficient screening and registration process for new arrivals.
"We hope to resume convoys to and from the border in a few days as soon as these new measures are in place," Pagonis said.
