A losing war

The outbreak of cholera in war-ravaged Yemen has so far claimed 242 lives, but at the speed with which it is spreading, it could affect close to a quarter of a million people in six months, according to the WHO country representative for Yemen.

“You can understand that with this number the price that we will pay in terms of lives will be extremely, extremely high,” he told a press conference on Friday, an ominous warning that should spur the international community to action.

Yemen’s health system cannot cope with the disaster. On Sunday, a state of emergency was declared in Yemen’s opposition-held capital Sanaa, where the outbreak killed scores of people over a two-week period. 

This is the second outbreak of cholera in less than a year in this Arab world’s poorest country devastated by a war that already killed over 10,000 people and displaced millions. 

The war destroyed most of the country’s infrastructure. According to UN sources, only a few medical facilities are still functioning and two-thirds of the population are without access to safe drinking water, a major reason for the outbreak of cholera, an acute diarrhoeal disease that is caused particularly by contaminated water, poor hygienic conditions and malnutrition.

With 17 million Yemenis, out of the 26 million population, lacking sufficient food and with 3 million malnourished children said by the UN to be in “grave peril”, the projections for Yemen are grim.

Cholera, which can be treated with oral rehydration solution, but which can kill within hours in severe cases if not treated with intravenous fluids and antibiotics, is recurring in Yemen, this time in an “unprecedented” resurgence because of the abysmal conditions in the country that the civil war took into the Dark Ages.

The fighting parties, irrespective of who is right or wrong, should realise that the cost of their war has risen to proportions that dwarf all other considerations.

They should put their differences aside, make peace and start reconstructing their destroyed country till there are still living souls in it.

If the fighting continues and the death toll from a plethora of diseases that could be prevented rises at the rates witnessed so far — in December, UNICEF said that at least one child dies every 10 minutes in Yemen because of malnutrition, diarrhoea and respiratory-tract infections — soon there will be no one left to rule over in the country.

After two years of warfare, the parties must have realised that there can be no winner, and the people of Yemen are the tragic losers.