Weeks after massive Cyclone Freddy hit Mozambique for a second time, the still-flooded country is facing a spiraling cholera outbreak that threatens to add to the devastation.
There were more than 19,000 confirmed cases of cholera across eight of Mozambique’s provinces as of Monday last week — a figure which that almost doubled in a week, the US Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
Freddy was likely the longest cyclone ever, lasting more than five weeks and hitting Mozambique twice. The tropical storm killed 165 people in Mozambique, 17 in Madagascar and 676 in Malawi. More than 530 people are still missing in Malawi two weeks later, and the country’s death toll could well exceed 1,200.
Photo: AP
Freddy made its second landfall in Mozambique’s Zambezia Province, where scores of villages remain flooded and water supplies are still contaminated.
At a hospital in Quelimane, Zambezia’s capital, Mozambican National Institute of Health Director-General Eduardo Sam Gudo Jr reported that there were 600 new confirmed cases a day in Quelimane district alone, but said that the real number might be as high as 1,000.
At least 31 died of cholera in Zambezia and more than 3,200 were hospitalized between March 15 and Wednesday, Mozambican Ministry of Health data showed.
Cases are highest in the neighborhood of Icidua on the city outskirts, where most residents live in bamboo or adobe mud huts and fetch water from communal wells.
Flooding brought by the cyclone has exposed many of these wells to water contaminated with sewage overflow and other sources of bacteria. Cholera spreads through feces, often when it gets into drinking water.
However, until water pipelines ruptured in the floods are repaired, these wells are the only source of water for those in Icidua and communities like it. For now, temporary solutions offer the only hope of stemming the outbreak.
Volunteers go from house to house distributing bottles of Certeza, a local chlorine-based water purifier. Each bottle should last a family a week, but supplies are running low as local production struggles to keep pace with demand.
There are also not enough people to distribute the Certeza, even if greater supplies could be procured, Gudo said.
In the meantime, health workers are struggling to treat the infected with many clinics and hospitals badly damaged. “The cyclone destroyed the infrastructure here,” said Jose da Costa Silva, clinical director of the Icidua health center. “We are working in parts of the hospital that were not destroyed. Some colleagues are working outside in the open, because there’s not enough space available for everyone.”
Eighty health centers in total were affected by Freddy’s two landfalls in Mozambique, the Mozambican National Disasters Management Institute said.
While Cyclone Freddy has not yet been attributed to climate change, researchers say it has all the right hallmarks of a warming-fueled weather event.
Formed in early February off Australia, the cyclone made an unprecedented crossing of more than 8,000km from east to west across the Indian Ocean.
It followed a looping path rarely recorded by meteorologists, hitting Madagascar and Mozambique for the first time at the end of February, and then again last month before barreling into Malawi.
Restoring normal water supplies in Mozambique will take time, as many damaged pipelines run through areas that are still inaccessible two weeks after the cyclone’s last impact.
“A cholera outbreak in a flooded flatland with a very high water table is ‘mission impossible’ to address,” UN Resident Coordinator in Mozambique Myrta Kaulard said. “Sanitation is a huge problem and the flooding has affected key infrastructure, such as the water pipelines and the electricity supply... Repairing that infrastructure in flooded areas is another ‘mission impossible.’”
Meanwhile, rural areas around Quelimane are facing other threats. Many villages and fields are still under water, and the humidity has bred swarms of mosquitoes carrying malaria. In a makeshift displacement camp on the bank of a flooded rice paddy near the village of Nicoadala, 20 out of 290 residents are sick with malaria, said Hilario Milisto Irawe, a local chief.
There were 444 reported cases of malaria in Quelimane district on 24 March alone, but the number is likely much higher as many, such as those in the camp outside Nicoadala, lack access to health facilities.
Compounding the public health crisis, the material livelihoods of hundreds of thousands are at risk as Freddy hit just before the main harvest. It also carried seawater inland, threatening the long-term fertility of the soil in an area where malnutrition is already chronic.
“All our farms are flooded. Our rice farms are destroyed. All we can do is start over again, but we don’t know how we will do that,” Irawe said.
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