A budding health crisis appears to be fomenting in the Spanish autonomous territory of Ceuta amid reports of groups of illegal migrants creating unsanitary conditions on the city’s beaches and even schools, which are claimed to be littered with garbage and “excrement”.
In the wake of upwards of 72,000 illegals flooding across the border from Morocco last month, health officials are warning that the Spanish exclave with a population of just 87,000 is not equipped to handle the needs of the thousands of migrants who have remained in the area.
Speaking on the Espejo Público news programme on Spanish broadcaster Antena 3, University Hospital of Ceuta doctor Guadalupe Sánchez warned that the city is facing a “humanitarian catastrophe” with the mass influx of migrants overwhelming the healthcare system and the local government’s ability to house them.
With many of the remaining migrants being forced to live in makeshift accommodations on Ceuta’s beaches, Sánchez said that people are afraid to go down to the beaches, saying: “They are occupied, they are full of huts, people are eating there, throwing food, it’s full of clothes, of excrement, of cigarettes.”
“With all the diseases I’m seeing, because my WhatsApp is full of photos of people from Ceuta who say ‘look at what came out on my child’, impetigo, mange, contagious diseases, this is a sanitary catastrophe.”
“The beach is contaminated; it is contaminated because, this has to be said, they are peeing, they are doing their necessities, they are bathing,” the doctor added.
Hellbound and Down 