Vaccine Supply Drains as Cholera Outbreaks Surge Worldwide: Is Climate Change One of the Causes for the Surge? /NYT/ECDC/Gianni Murzi

 

A record number of outbreaks have been reported after droughts, floods and wars have forced large numbers of people to live in unsanitary conditions. Countries reporting new cases are Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Malawi, Mozambique, Nepal, Philippines, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Zambia.

Outbreaks have been reported in the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, putting the health of millions at risk and overwhelming fragile health systems. Untreated, the disease, which is commonly spread through contaminated water, can cause death by dehydration in as little as one day, as the body tries to expel a virulent bacteria in gushes of vomit and watery diarrhea.

In Haiti, cholera has broken out as whole neighborhoods of people displaced by violence are packed into small open patches in Port-au-Prince, sharing a single cracked pipe of water that runs through untreated waste. Cholera is also festering in the country’s severely overcrowded prisons.

In Syria, millions of people displaced by the civil war lack access to clean water, while the years of fighting have destroyed sanitation infrastructure. Raw sewage is being pumped into the Euphrates River, which hundreds of thousands of people depend on for water. The United Nations reports more than 20,000 suspected cholera cases and 75 deaths there.

The International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh hospital, where the cholera treatment was pioneered and which played a key role in the development of the vaccine, saw a record number of cholera patients in March and April this year. Instead of a typical 400 patients a day, the hospital treated 1,500, most of them in giant tents erected outside the facility to absorb the crowds, said Dr. Tahmeed Ahmed, the center’s executive director. There, the driver was not flood but heat: Extreme temperatures led to large-scale population movement, leaving people without clean water.

But only a few people died, he said, because simple oral rehydration salts and antibiotics will cure most cases. Then, to help end that outbreak, more than two million people were vaccinated using contact tracing to hot spots. Bangladesh has been working toward preventive vaccination in known cholera flashpoints in an effort to keep outbreaks from starting.

Please see more from ECDC here and from the NYT here