Cholera Compounds Suffering in a Yemen Torn by War
Cholera, a waterborne disease that can quickly explode into a public health disaster, has begun to spread in Yemen, a war-ravaged country ill equipped to fight it.
The World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders, the international medical charity, reported on Tuesday what they described as alarming increases in the number of cholera cases in Yemen in the past few weeks.
“We are very concerned that the disease will continue to spread and become out of control,” Shinjiro Murata, the head of the Yemen mission for Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement.
Mr. Murata said the charity’s teams in Yemen had seen a drastic rise in cholera, treating more than 780 patients in five provinces since March 30. He called for an urgent increase in humanitarian assistance “to limit the spread of the outbreak and anticipate other potential outbreaks.”
The outbreak has affected Sana, the capital, where news agencies have reported on piles of garbage and clogged sewage drains related to a strike by sanitation workers exasperated over weeks of unpaid wages.
Spread by feces in contaminated water, cholera can cause severe vomiting and diarrhea, and it can lead to fatal dehydration within hours if untreated with fluids and antibiotics.
The danger of a cholera epidemic in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, has been greatly amplified by what amounts to a collapse in the public health system because of the two-year-old war between Houthi insurgents and the government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia.
Since the war began in March 2015, many hospitals, which have been damaged by airstrikes and other attacks, have closed, essentially denying medical access to vast portions of the country.
The outbreak only further compounds the acute deprivations in Yemen, where roughly 17 million people — about two-thirds of the population — are facing severe hunger and possible famine. An estimated two million Yemeni children under the age of 5 are considered acutely malnourished.
The International Rescue Committee, an aid group that responds to the most urgent disasters, has called Yemen “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.”