Yemen cholera cases pass 300,000 mark, ICRC says

A 10-week cholera epidemic hasnow infected more than 300,000 people in Yemen, theInternational Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Monday,a health disaster on top of war, economic collapse andnear-famine in the impoverished country.

"Disturbing. We're at 300k+ suspected cases with ~7k newcases/day," ICRC regional director Robert Mardini said in a
tweet.

The World Health Organization has said there were 297,438suspected cases and 1,706 deaths by July 7, but it did notpublish a daily update on Sunday, when the 300,000 mark lookedset to be reached. A WHO spokesman said the figures were stillbeing analyzed by Yemen's health ministry.

• More than 200,000 suspected cholera cases in Yemen
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Although the daily growth rate in the overall number ofcases has halved to just over 2 per cent in recent weeks and thespread of the disease has slowed in the worst-hit regions,outbreaks in other areas have grown rapidly.

The most intense impact has been in areas in the west of thecountry which have been fiercely contested in the two-year warbetween a Saudi-led coalition and armed Iran-aligned Houthirebels.

The war has been a breeding ground for the disease, whichspreads by faeces getting into food or water and thrives inplaces with poor sanitation.

In the past week a first few cases have appeared in Sayuncity and Mukalla port in Hadramawt region in the east.

Yemen's economic collapse means 30,000 healthworkers havenot been paid for more than 10 months, so the U.N. has steppedin with "incentive" payments to get them involved in anemergency campaign to fight the disease.

The WHO has said its response, based on a network ofrehydration points and the remnants of Yemen's shattered healthsystem, has succeeded in catching the disease early and keepingthe death rate from the disease low, at 0.6 percent of cases.

The spread of the disease is also being limited by "herdimmunity" the natural protection afforded by a largeproportion of the population contracting and then surviving thedisease.

It is not yet clear how people could be affected in total.

Early in the outbreak, the WHO said there could be 300,000 caseswithin six months, but on June 27 it said the epidemic may havereached the halfway mark at 218,800 cases.

However, since then, the daily number of new cases has risenfrom an average of about 6,500 to about 7,200, according to aReuters analysis of WHO data.