Hommam Al Nassim 
The United Nations has warned that the number of people infected with cholera and acute diarrhoea in Somalia since the beginning of the year has reached about 4,400, a significant increase compared to previous years.
The spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, Stephane Dujarric, stated that “the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is concerned about the spread of cholera and acute liquid diarrhoea in the country.”
Dujarric said the situation requires urgent action, with 4,400 cases and 54 deaths recorded since the beginning of the year in almost half of Somalia’s regions, with more than 60 percent of the deceased being children under the age of five.
Dujarric explained that this number is three times the number of infections and deaths in the previous three years.
Dujarric stressed the need for additional funding to implement the six-month action plan for Somalia, which includes drug storage and case monitoring, requiring $6 million to implement.
This comes in the context of the United Nations efforts to combat humanitarian crises in Somalia, where the value of the Humanitarian Response Plan for the current year 2024 amounted to approximately $ 1.6 billion, but only 10% of this amount has been secured so far.
It is noteworthy that cholera is a disease spread through food and water contaminated with feces containing the bacterium “Fibrio cholera”, and the countries most affected by this disease are Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Sudan, Syria, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
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