A 10-week cholera epidemic has now infected more than 300,000 people in Yemen, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said yesterday, a health disaster on top of war, economic collapse and near-famine in the impoverished nation.
“Disturbing. We’re at 300k+ suspected cases with ~7k new cases/day,” ICRC regional director Robert Mardini said on Twitter.
The WHO said there were 297,438 suspected cases and 1,706 deaths by Friday, but it did not publish a daily update on Sunday, when the 300,000 mark looked set to be reached.
A WHO spokesman said the figures were still being analyzed by the Yemen Ministry of Public Health.
Although the daily growth rate in the overall number of cases has halved to just more than 2 percent in recent weeks and the spread of the disease has slowed in the worst-hit regions, outbreaks in other areas have grown rapidly.
The hardest-hit areas have been in the nation’s west, which have been fiercely contested in the two-year war between a Saudi-led coalition and armed Iran-aligned Houthi rebels.
The war has been a breeding ground for the disease, which spreads by feces contaminating food or water and thrives in places with poor sanitation.
Over the past week, a few cases have appeared in the city of Sayun and Mukalla Port in the Hadramawt region in the east.
Yemen’s economic collapse means that 30,000 health workers have not been paid for more than 10 months, so the UN has stepped in with “incentive” payments to get them involved in an emergency campaign to fight the disease.
The WHO has said its response, based on a network of rehydration points and the remnants of Yemen’s shattered health system, has succeeded in catching the disease early and keeping the death rate from the disease low at 0.6 percent of cases.
The spread of the disease is also being limited by herd immunity — the natural protection afforded by a large proportion of the population contracting and then surviving the disease.
It is not yet clear how people could be affected. Early in the outbreak, the WHO said there could be 300,000 cases within six months, but on June 27, it said the epidemic might have reached the halfway mark at 218,800 cases.
However, since then, the daily number of new cases has risen from an average of about 6,500 to about 7,200, according to WHO data.
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