Cholera vaccine shipment arrives in Aden

ADEN, July 20 (YPA) – A shipment containing 500,000 doses of oral vaccines for cholera epidemic arrived on Saturday at Aden International Airport, southern Yemen, after the number of infected cases has doubled since the beginning of the year 2019.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in its Twitter account that this shipment of vaccine is allocated for the second round of the cholera oral vaccination campaign targeting four provinces with high-risk ratio.

UNICEF indicated that hundreds of thousands of Yemeni children were infected with cholera in the first six months of 2019, exceeding the number of cases in 2018, which could trigger a new pandemic wave similar to that of two years ago, when the number of infected cases and deaths of cholera amounted to thousands.

“Save the Children” organization said, in a recent report, that the number of people suffering from cholera in Yemen doubled in 2019 compared to last year. “The number of infected cases in the past six months amounted to 440 thousand people, about half of them children.”

According to medical figures, 64 people died of cholera in Aden last June, mostly from African illegal immigrants.

The southern provinces are experiencing a marked increase in the cases of cholera, especially with the influx of illegal immigrants and the preoccupation of executive offices and local authorities in Aden, Abyan, Lahj and Hadramout in conflict over control of the decision-making center.

YPA