United Nations aid agencies will likely be forced to shift resources used for fighting malnutrition to contain the spread of cholera in war-torn Yemen, said a United Nations official late Tuesday.
The announcement from the U.N. officials comes a day before the WHO's new director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is expected to address the U.N. Security Council by videoconference about Yemen's cholera crisis.
On June 24, the WHO declared the cholera outbreak in Yemen as "the worst cholera outbreak in the world", with more than 200,000 suspected cases and that number has increased by 100,000 in over two weeks.
While easily preventable with proper sanitation procedures, after more than two years of war the country's health, water and sanitation systems are on the verge of breaking down, making the food and water-borne epidemic very hard to contain.
Last month, following a request from Yemen's internationally recognized government, the World Health Organization and several key partners agreed to send 1 million doses of vaccine, the largest of its kind since 1 million doses were sent to Haiti after Hurricane Matthew last fall.
The war in Yemen has left more than 10,000 dead since it escalated with the Saudi-led coalition intervention in March 2015.
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"The actual system is in complete collapse", he said.
Vaccines, too, are not easy to rollout, since they require refrigeration and follow up injections. The vaccines have to be kept in cold storage, and patients should receive a follow-up vaccination after the first one.
The outbreak was first reported in October and cholera has since been identified in 19 governorates, or territories. "However, there are many areas in the country where the trend line is moving up, and those areas are, as you would imagine, the most remote" - or behind conflict lines.
"All of this is entirely man-made, as a result of the conflict", McGoldrick said by phone from Amman, Jordan.
The most intense impact has been in areas in the west of the country which have seen recent fierce fighting.
"This unprecedented cholera epidemic would further weaken the resources and the resilience that people had over the last two and a half years of this war", said the Yemen Humanitarian Coordinator, Jamie McGoldrick to reporters in Geneva.
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