DHAKA: As three-month-old Asoma Khatu approached her final, laboured breaths, her neighbour Elia, a 50-year-old former farmer, dug through the strongbox holding some of the last medicines in this camp for Myanmar’s displaced Rohingya.

First, they got some paracetamol for the severely malnourished girl’s fever and a wet towel for her forehead, then some rehydration salts for her diarrhoea. There was nothing else left.

The death of Asoma in a dusty, stifling hot camp a two-hour boat ride from Sittwe, capital of Rakhine State in west Myanmar, is part of a growing health crisis for stateless Muslim Rohingya that has been exacerbated by restrictions on international aid.

‘I think my child would have made it if someone was here to help,’ Asoma’s mother, Gorima, told media, as she cradled the girl’s shrouded, almost weightless body in her arms, reports The Straits Times.

In February, Myanmar’s government expelled the main aid group providing health to more than half a million Rohingya in Rakhine State - Medecins Sans Frontieres-Holland (MSF-H) - after the group said it had treated people believed to have been victims of violence in southern Maungdaw township, near the Bangladesh border, in January.

BDST: 1315 HRS, APR 28, 2014