From WN

Yemen’s cholera outbreak is close to hitting 400,000 cases on Tuesday but there is new hope according to the World Health Organization that the three-month-old epidemic is beginning to slow down, according to Reuters.

WHO data provided to Reuters showed a dramatic fall over the past month in the number of those dying from the disease, from close to 30 per day to single figures, which suggests the strategy of setting up a network of rehydration points to help patients early on in the disease is working in Yemen.

Cholera is spread after ingesting food or water that’s contaminated by the Vibrio cholerae bacterium, which can kill within several hours if untreated.

The deaths figures show that 99.5 percent of patients are now surviving the disease in Yemen, where a devastating civil war and economic collapse has left millions close to starvation in the Middle East’s poorest country.

“We are confronted with the vicious circle where war destroys (the) water distribution system, water is not available or contaminated and people are infecting themselves,” ICRC President Peter Maurer said during a visit to Taiz governorate on Tuesday.

“To cope with the crisis we need a fundamental change in attitude and behavior of the belligerents,” an ICRC statement quoted Maurer as saying.

The newest report from July 24 released by WHO showed 396,086 Yemenis were believed to have the disease, which would be 1 in 50 of the population, with 1,869 deaths associated with the epidemic.

New cases are still coming in at around 5,000 to 6,000 per day, but the epidemic curve shows the outbreak peaked about three weeks ago.

Normally epidemics see as many cases after the peak as before, but the International Committee of the Red Cross believes that the number of people affected will affect 600,000 people by the end of 2017.

Experts also said the main challenge at the outset of the cholera epidemic was how badly the infrastructure in Yemen for transportation to reach the remote destinations that were hit the hardest by the disease and for limited access to clean drinking water.

The cholera outbreak has provoked an international response from around the world and for the U.N. to revise their humanitarian assessment for the country which calculates 20.7 million Yemenis as in need of assistance, compared to the previous figure of 18.8 million.

Cholera has also been spreading in Somalia, Kenya, Congo, Nigeria, Tanzania, and South Sudan, where the WHO is about to begin a massive vaccination campaign with 500,000 doses of oral cholera vaccine.

Although Yemen has had the massive outbreak of cholera, the largest in any country in the space of a year, the WHO said they were delaying a vaccination campaign until 2018.

“A cholera vaccination campaign originally planned for July 2017 has been postponed at the request of the health authorities, in favor of a much larger preventive campaign next year targeting millions of Yemenis at risk of the disease,” a WHO statement said.

–WN.com, Maureen Foody

For more on this story and video go to: https://article.wn.com/view/2017/07/25/Worst_Cholera_Epidemic_on_Record_in_Yemen_Finally_Slowing_Af/