Houthi rebels declare state of emergency over cholera outbreak

People infected with cholera lie on beds at a hospital in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, Yemen. The cholera outbreak has killed 115 people. Abduljabbar Zeyad / Reuters

SANAA // Houthi rebels in Yemen’s capital have declared a state of emergency, sounding the alarm over a spreading cholera outbreak that has killed dozens in the war-torn country and calling for urgent international assistance.

Cholera has killed 115 people and infected 8,600 in the past two weeks, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Yemen Jamie McGoldrick said on Monday.

Only a few medical facilities are still functioning and two-thirds of the population are without access to safe drinking water, the UN has said.

Yemen has been divided by civil war since the Iranian-backed Houthis seized power in the capital Sanaa in 2014. The Saudi-led coalition entered the conflict in March 2015 to reinstate the internationally-recognised president Abdrabu Mansur Hadi.

The Houthi-run health ministry said cases of cholera had risen and it could not contain the disaster, according to the rebel-controlled Saba news agency.

It launched an appeal for help from international humanitarian organisations to deal with the crisis.

The state of emergency is an “indication of how serious this crisis is”, Mr McGoldrick said on Monday.

He said medicine was arriving but urged donor countries to fulfil more than $1 billion (Dh3.67bn) in aid pledges made in Geneva last month.

“This rapid outbreak of cholera is just another dire manifestation of the humanitarian catastrophe that faces this country,” he said.

“These numbers will increase in the weeks and months ahead,” Mr McGoldrick warned.

Dominik Stillhart, the director of operations at the ICRC, said Yemen was “facing a serious outbreak of cholera”.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) expressed fears that health authorities alone would not be able to deal with the outbreak.

It called on international organisations to “scale up their assistance urgently to limit the spread of the outbreak and anticipate potential other ones”.

This is the second outbreak of cholera in less than a year in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country. Cholera is a bacterial infection contracted through ingesting contaminated food or water.

At the Sabaeen hospital in Sanaa, deputy director Nabeel Al Najjar said the understaffed medical facility was struggling to cope with the high influx of patients.

The hospital, which lacks medicines, is receiving between 150 to 200 patients with cholera symptoms a day, he said.

“We are putting four patients in each bed, and have placed extra beds in tents and under the trees in the garden,” he said, adding rain had then complicated the arrangements.

Twenty-five districts in 11 governorates have been affected in the past four weeks, Mr McGoldrick said, with more than 50 other districts at risk.

“It’s very likely that the numbers are very underrepresented because ... over 50 per cent of the health facilities in this country are no longer functioning,” he said.

The World Health Organisation now classifies Yemen as one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in the world alongside Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria and Iraq.

The UN has warned 17 million people — equivalent to two-thirds of the population — are at imminent risk of famine in Yemen.

More than 8,000 people have been killed since March 2015, according to the WHO.

* Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and Reuters