African Cholera Epidemic Worsens
UN News Centre
At the beginning of February, the Lancet published an article on the humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe, which came to a head in a massive outbreak of cholera in the country. The WHO reported that between August 2008 and late February this year, there had been more than 79,000 suspected cases of cholera in Zimbabwe alone resulting in nearly four thousand deaths.
Since then, the situation has only worsened. According to the UN Office for the Co-Ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), earlier this month, cholera cases have been reported in nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Between the 3rd and 17th of April, these countries reported a total of 4,579 new cases of cholera, and in the two weeks before that 6,460 new cases were reported. These latest cases bring the total number in southern Africa to 155,692, 96,718 of those in Zimbabwe, which has been worst affected by the disease, leaving 4,686 people dead including 4,218 Zimbabweans.
In the wake of this situation comes new research from the Carlos III Institute of Health in Madrid, conducted in Zambia between 2003 and 2006 that links environmental temperature with the extent of the epidemic. The study’s results indicate that an increase in temperature six weeks before the outbreak is responsible for the 4.9% increase in the number of people affected by the disease. This gives some of the most conclusive evidence to date linking climate change to global health, and gives a worrying indicator that if global warming continues, future epidemics will be more severe and claim more lives.