MEASLES, mumps, chicken pox...

These diseases no longer exist, or pose no real risk to your health; you might think.

However, at the Kutupalong refugee camp, where Montgomery GP Alan Woodall spent two weeks volunteering, it’s a very different story. There, adults and children have so little access to food that diseases such as measles, mumps and chicken pox are life threatening.

“Every day on the camp people were dying from malnourishment related diseases,” Dr Woodall said.

Kutupalong is the largest refugee camp in the world. It’s on the Bangladesh-Burmese border and houses nearly one million Rohingya refugees from the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Myanmar. Dr Woodall describes the camp as a “shanty town” where people are “stuck in limbo”. “It’s effectively a huge prison,” he said.

There’s no running water, no electricity or sanitation in the camp. The only healthcare available comes from NGOs including the world good programme, Doctors Without Borders and charities such as Med Global, who Dr Woodall volunteers with, staffing primary care clinics.

While Dr Woodall was working in the camp, he would see between 50 and 60 patients a day. Many of these patients had malnutrition related diseases – a result of them simply not having enough food to eat.

Each family of around four is given just 15kg of dried rice, 2kg of lentils and 2 litres of cooking oil every two weeks as survival rations.

Dr Woodall said: “Anything extra has to be grown or bartered for.

“Many girls as young as 12 are married off to reduce the size of the family to make food go further.”

The GP, from Llanidloes, didn’t just deal with diseases. A lot of the patients he saw had problems relating directly to the conflict and persecution they had faced. He saw people who had been raped, had bullet wounds and suffered from mental health conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder as a result of what they had been through.

During his time on the camp, Dr Woodall diagnosed a man with stomach cancer. In the UK, this is something he would treat and hope to cure. But in Bangladesh, there was very little he could do.

“There’s no treatment.

“There’s nothing we can do, nothing apart from treat his pain until he dies,” he said.

Going back to work in Mid Wales after spending a couple of weeks in a refugee camp in South Asia was quite the contrast for Dr Woodall.

“It reminds me how lucky we are as a population and how lucky I am as a doctor,” he said. In the camp, he was not able to do things he takes for granted such as send patients off for tests or x-rays.

“Even if there is a bit of a wait, people will get the treatment they need,” he said.

To help fund medical supplies at the camp, click here.