War, hunger and now cholera

The World Health Organization said that Yemen is battling a cholera outbreak that has led to more than 500,000 suspected cases, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

By last December, the main hospital in the city of Hajjah in northern Yemen had already received 200 suspected cases of cholera. The patients were being treated at a month-old cholera center supported by the World Health Organization.

Across the country, United Nations workers had recorded 122 confirmed cases by then, including 10 confirmed deaths and 72 suspected deaths.

Today, the number of suspected cholera cases in Yemen has reached half a million and nearly 2,000 people have died, the WHO recently reported. It is now the largest cholera epidemic in the world.

Only a few years ago, the waterborne disease had been nearly eradicated in Yemen.

The Washington Post reporter said When I visited the Hajjah hospital, it was hard to imagine another instigator tormenting the poorest nation in the Middle East. War-ravaged Yemen was reeling from a severe hunger crisis and worsening poverty. Parents were being forced to choose between taking their sick children to the hospital and feeding their healthy ones.

The hospital itself was in shambles. Ventilation machines and other essential equipment were broken. The staff had not been paid in four months. The facility owed dlrs 55,000 to the water department in unpaid bills, the reporter said.

If it wasn’t for international funds, the hospital would have never opened the cholera center. Still, when I was last there, the disease seemed to be the least of Yemen’s many woes, the reporter added.

The outbreak started to spread fast at the end of April, propelled by poor sanitation and limited access to clean water for millions of Yemenis. And although its spread has slowed in some areas, it is speeding up in other zones, infecting an estimated 5,000 people per day, the WHO said.

All this as the health system has further crumbled. Airstrikes from a Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels have destroyed or damaged more than half of Yemen’s heath facilities. A lack of funds has forced others to close. 

Source: MENA