Yemen’s cholera outbreak is set to hit 400,000 cases, but there are signs the three-month-old epidemic is slowing, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).<br /><br />The heads of three United Nations agencies – UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organisation – travelled to Yemen to witness first-hand the scale of the humanitarian crisis and to step up combined efforts to help ease the crisis.<br /><br />A dramatic fall over the past month in the number of people dying from the disease each day, from about 30 to single figures, suggests the WHO’s strategy of setting up a network<br />of rehydration points to catch patients early is working. Cholera is spread by ingestion of food or water contaminated by the Vibrio cholerae bacterium and can kill within<br />hours if untreated.<br /><br />The death figures indicate that 99.5 percent of patients now survive in Yemen, where a devastating civil war and economic collapse has left millions on the brink of starvation.<br /><br />The latest WHO situation report showed 396,086 Yemenis were thought to have caught the diarrhoeal disease by July 24, about 1 in 50 of the population. <br /><br />New cases are continuing at between 5,000 and 6,000 per day, but the epidemic curve shows that the outbreak peaked about three weeks ago.<br /><br />But British-based NGO Oxfam projected the number of suspected cases of cholera could rise to more than 600,000, making the epidemic “the largest ever recorded in any country in a single year since records began”, exceeding Haiti’s in 2011.<br /><br />Oxfam also warned that the Yemeni rainy season from July to September would increase the risk of the disease spreading further through water contaminated with faeces.<br />
