The wife of the U.S. vice president, Jill Biden, will travel to Kenya in the near future to assess the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Horn of Africa. She'll accompany Rajiv Shah, who, as administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, is at the forefront of U.S. emergency assistance efforts. The United States has committed almost $460 million to the aid effort, and is the largest worldwide food donor.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this official travel August 4, 2011 as part of the U.S. and international response to an unfolding humanitarian disaster that is expected to affect some 12 million people. She also decried attempts by al-Shabaab militants to block the delivery of food assistance to people in Somalia who are suffering in the aftermath of drought and crop failure.

"It is particularly tragic that during the Holy Month of Ramadan, al-Shabaab are preventing assistance to the most vulnerable populations in Somalia," said Clinton, "namely children, including infants and girls and women who are attempting to bring themselves and those children to safety." Clinton made the remarks August 4 when she addressed reporters briefly after meeting with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird.

"I would like publicly to express our deep appreciation to Canada for the Canadian government's and the Canadian's people's strong partnership and extensive aid in the region," she said.

The United Nations has declared that a state of famine exists in a broad swath of Somalia, while severe food shortages exist in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia. Somalis are deserting their parched lands in search of assistance, many of them internally displaced within their national borders. But hundreds of thousands are pouring into camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.

The U.N. Refugee Agency reported August 5 that the number of Somali refugees arriving at three camps located at Dadaab, Kenya, has increased to almost 1,500 a day in the first four days of August. That's an increase from an average of 1,300 a day in July.

The total population of the three camps near Dadaab exceeds 400,000, the equivalent of becoming the third-largest city in Kenya, according to a U.N. calculation.

In Ethiopia, refugees are flocking to three camps previously established by the international agencies. A fourth camp, opened in recent days, sees 1,000 refugees transported there each day, according to the refugee agency.

The United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, is gearing up health care delivery at the Dadaab camps, with immunization for measles and polio as a top priority.

"Malnutrition can weaken a child's immune system, increasing their susceptibility to infectious disease like measles and polio," said Ibrahim Conteh, an emergency coordinator at UNICEF Dadaab. "We are acting now because these diseases can spread very quickly in overcrowded conditions like we have now in the camps."

About 100,000 children have already been vaccinated, according to a UNICEF press release, which also says the agency is offering deworming and vitamin A supplements for the fatigued refugees who arrive at the Kenya-Somalia border.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/iipdigital-en/index.html)