SRI LANKA: High incidence of combat wounds among evacuees

Relief workers in Sri Lanka report hundreds of war wounds among people fleeing the last pocket of the long-running conflict.

"There are people with shrapnel injuries, others with limbs that need to be amputated," Sarasi Wijeratne, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told IRIN.

Many of their wounds were either infected because bandages had not been changed or they had not been treated properly with antibiotics, she said. Read more ...