With tens of thousands of people forced from their homes and into crowded and unsanitary temporary camps, hospital officials said they were overwhelmed by admissions with newcomers forced to sleep on ward floors and corridors.
The child, who was already suffering from malnutrition, passed away in the Garissa District Hospital, 300km north-east of Nairobi, after nearby camps for the people displaced by flooding were hit by disease outbreaks.
"We have one mortality, but so far we have admitted at least 65 children suffering from malaria, diarrhoea and malnutrition," hospital superintendent Khadija Abdalla said. "All the cases were from the camps."
"We have been forced to admit patients way beyond our capacity and many are forced to sleep on the floor and corridors," she said. "Our fear is a massive outbreak of diseases in the camps."
"We are in need of essential medicine, clean water, oral re-hydration salts and vitamin tablets," Abdalla said.
Kenyan health officials have warned of possible disease outbreaks in flood-hit regions, where torrential rains have killed at least 40 people and displaced around 200 000 others over recent weeks.
Officials said medical staff from the health ministry and Kenya Red Cross Society had rushed to the area to treat the patients and improve sanitation conditions.
Humanitarian groups say some 300 000 people across the east African nation need humanitarian supplies in the coming months owing to the effects of floods.
In neighbouring Somalia, where floods have killed at least 96 people, displaced more than 300 000 and affected about million others, health officials have also sounded the alarm for outbreaks of waterborne diseases, particularly cholera, which has already been confirmed in two areas.
In both countries the floods have destroyed farmlands, disrupted food supplies, cut off villages and washed away roads, which in Somalia complicates the delivery of aid to the most vulnerable and impoverished in remote areas.
The flooding has been caused by unusually heavy seasonal rains across the Horn of Africa, which last year at this time was facing a scorching drought that put some 11 million people in five countries at risk.
Source: AFP, Nov 27, 2006