Cholera spreads in Somalia
BURAO: Deadly cholera is spreading through drought-ravaged Somalia as clean water sources dry up, a top aid official said, deepening a humanitarian crisis in a country that is on the verge of famine.
The Horn of Africa nation has recorded more than 18,000 cases of cholera so far this year, up from around 15,000 in all of 2016 and 5,000 in a normal year, Johan Heffinck, the Somalia head of EU Humanitarian Aid, said in an e-mail on Thursday.
The current strain of the disease is unusually deadly, killing around 1 in 45 patients.
Somalia is suffering from a severe drought that means more than half of its 12 million citizens are expected to need aid by July. Families have been forced to drink slimy, infected water after the rains failed and wells and rivers dried up.
“We are very close to famine,” Heffinck said. The Security Infor- mation Network (FSIN), which is co-sponsored by the United Nations food agency, said in a report on Friday Somalia was one of four African countries at high risk of famine.
Somalia’s rainy season normally runs from March to May, but there has been no rain this month.
The drought has hit particularly hard in the breakaway northern region of Somaliland, where the rains began to fail in 2015, killing off animals that nomadic families rely on to survive.
Listless, skinny children last week lay in crowded wards in the main hospital in the regional capital Hargeisa.
Three-year-old Nimaan Hassid had diarrhoea for 20 days before his mother brought him to hospital. He weighs only 6.5 kilogrammes, less than half the normal weight for his age.
Doctors say he is suffering from severe malnutrition but his grandmother, 60-year-old Fadumo Hussein, said the family has no money for food or clean water.
“We don’t have mineral water to give to the sick child. This is the last bottle,” she said, carefully pouring it into a feeding tube inserted through his nose. If the rains fail, the country could tip into famine. Somalia’s last famine, in 2011, killed more than 260,000 people.