Oct 5, 2022 21:03
The World Health Organization said today, Wednesday, that the number of cholera outbreaks has increased around the world this year.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that during the first nine months of the year, 27 countries declared cholera outbreaks.
He pointed out that more than 10,000 cholera cases have been recorded in Syria alone during the past few weeks.
Meanwhile, Haiti was reported to have been free of cholera for three years.
The World Health Organization did not address the estimate of the number of infections around the world.
In Haiti, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday that the number of deaths from a cholera outbreak may be “much higher” than reported and expected cases to rise.
And this country, mired in crises, announced, on Sunday, the death of at least seven people as a result of cholera, which renews fears of the spread of this disease again, nearly three years after the last confirmed case was recorded.
On Tuesday, Malawi’s Minister of Health, Kumbisi Khombiz Chibunda, said that cholera had spread to 22 of Malawi’s 28 provinces, killing 110 people and infecting 3,891 people since the first case was recorded in March.
In mid-September, the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention said it had recorded about 40,000 cholera cases in a month.
Tedros described this development as worrying, given that the problem is not limited to the increase in the number of cases of the disease, but because the deaths are increasing.
He said that the death rate this year is three times higher than the rate during the past five years, noting that cholera is spreading in places suffering from poverty and conflict, and in places where people are struggling to face the repercussions of climate change.
Source: agencies
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