The World Health Organization (WHO) said a cholera epidemic has killed some 1,310 people in war-torn Yemen since late April, warning that as many as 300,000 could get infected by the end of August.
More than 200,000 suspected cases of cholera have been recorded in the country, WHO’s Yemen office said in a statement on Saturday.
A UN report has said children account for half of the registered cases to date, and about a quarter of the recorded fatalities.
Cholera is a highly contagious bacterial infection spread through contaminated food or water. It can be fatal within hours if left untreated.
Although the disease is easily treatable, doing so in conflict-torn Yemen has proved particularly difficult.
Yemen has been since March 2015 under a brutal aggression by Saudi-led coalition. Tens of thousands of Yemenis have been injured and martyred in Saudi-led strikes, with the vast majority of them are civilians.
The coalition has been also imposing a blockade on the impoverished country’s ports and airports as a part of his aggression which is aimed at restoring power to fugitive former president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.
Two years of war have killed more than 10,000 people, wounded 45,000 others, and displaced more than 11 percent of the country’s 26 million people.
“This is because of conflict, it’s man-made, it’s very severe, the numbers are absolutely staggering. It’s getting worse,” Stephen O’Brien, a senior UN humanitarian affairs official, said.
“The cholera element in addition to all the lack of food, the lack of medical supplies is, of course, primarily, one has to put that at the door of all parties to the conflict.”
Source: Agencies
