A recent UNICEF survey in Baghdad found that acute malnutrition rates for children under the age of five have skyrocketed from four percent last summer to 7.7 percent post-war.

"The combination of less water and worse quality has increased diarrhea morbidity quite substantially and that leads to increased malnutrition," UNICEF representative, Carel de Rooy, told Reuters News Service. "One can assume looking at all of this that the situation is worse than the pre-war one. Definitely, it is not better."

A 2002 UNICEF survey found that about half the children suffering from acute malnutrition died before their fifth birthday.

Rooy said diarrhea morbidity in southern Baghdad has also increased since 2002.

Health experts are concerned that this year's statistics are reflected throughout urban Iraq, where water is unreliable and raw sewage pours into densely populated areas.

While a decade of economic sanctions were largely blamed for Iraq's notoriously precarious health care system, the U.S.-led coalition has been slow to respond to devastated hospitals left unprotected and plundered by looters immediately after the war, vitally degrading Iraqis access to treatment.