Genenva: The United Nations warned on Friday that cholera is a "pandemic killing the poor" that threatens one billion people in 43 countries, despite the ease of prevention and treatment.
The UN described the situation as dire, claiming that it lacked the resources to contain the outbreaks and that the longer it took to begin the fight, the worse things would get.
The UN is requesting $640 million from the World Health Organisation and UNICEF to combat the infectious disease, citing the threat of a "cholera catastrophe" if action is not immediately stepped up.
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Henry Grey, the incident manager for the global cholera response at the UN health agency, stated that according to WHO estimates, a billion people in 43 different countries are at risk of contracting cholera.
Cholera outbreaks have been reported in 24 countries so far this year, as opposed to 15 by mid-May last year. Cholera is spreading to previously unaffected nations, and case fatality rates are far higher than the typical one case per 100 cases.
Grey attributed the rise in cases to poverty, conflict, and climate change, as well as the population shifts they cause that separate people from access to medical care and safer food and water sources.
At a media briefing, he said, "Resources that were available for prevention and response are more thinly spread as the number of countries affected by cholera increases.
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A bacterium that causes cholera is typically spread through contaminated food or water. Young children are especially at risk because it causes vomiting and diarrhoea.
By guaranteeing access to clean water and enhancing surveillance, outbreaks can be avoided. But according to Grey, lives that could have been saved will be lost due to a lack of funding for quick action.
"The overall solution is long-term investment in wastewater infrastructure," he continued. The scarcity of vaccines does not help the campaign.
There were about 36 million doses of the cholera vaccine produced last year, but manufacturers do not find it to be a desirable product because there is essentially no market in developed nations.
This year, over 18 million doses of the oral cholera vaccine have been requested; however, only eight million of those doses have been made available, stopping prevention campaigns.
Only one dose is being given to recipients rather than the full two "to try to spin it out," said Grey. There may be two times as many doses available by 2025 and two times as many by 2027.
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Even with those numbers, Grey warned that if the cholera outbreak trend continues, "we won't have enough." Over a ten-year period, there were fewer cases of cholera, but in 2021, the trend turned around.
Malawi and Mozambique have been the nations this year that have been most severely impacted. The following nine nations are classified as being in "acute crisis": Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Syria, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
