Mariupol bracing for cholera epidemic

MARIUPOL has been put in quarantine to control a possible cholera outbreak, Ukrainian authorities said yesterday.

Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, told Ukrainian television that the city is bracing for an epidemic as corpses and litter are piling up in streets contaminating the city.

“The word ‘cholera’ is increasingly heard in the city among local officials and their supervisors,” said Mr Andryushchenko, quoting his sources in the city that has been under Russian control since last month. He left Mariupol early on in the war.

“As far as we can see the epidemic has more or less begun already.”

He said that Ukrainian officials were so far aware of only a few isolated cases. Where there is poor sanitation and water treatment, cholera spreads through drinking water contaminated with faeces.

Most of the city’s infrastructure has been obliterated by Russian air strikes. There are no health services to speak of, and most of the remaining 100,000 residents have no access to running water. Dorit Nitzan, the regional emergency director at the World Health Organisation, said it received reports that some streets in Mariupol were “like a swamp and wastewater was mixed with drinking water”, which increases the danger of diseases like cholera.

“With the lack of vaccines, even such a thing as an outbreak of dysentery could lead to tens of thousands of deaths,” Mr Andryushchenko says.

It came as Russia began turning over the bodies of Ukrainian fighters killed at the Azovstal steelworks.