More than 8,000 children under five contracted cholera in the first seven months of the year in the crisis-hit North Kivu province, UNICEF warned on Friday, calling it “the worst cholera crisis” since 2017.
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This province in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been plagued by armed conflicts that have resulted in the displacement of the population for almost three decades.
According to Unicef, at least 31,342 cases of cholera were recorded nationwide in the first seven months of 2023, with 230 deaths, many of them children.
According to the DRC’s Health Ministry, quoted by Unicef, there are more than 21,400 cases in the hardest-hit province of North Kivu, including more than 8,000 children under the age of five.
“The scale of the cholera epidemic and the devastation it threatens should set alarm bells ringing,” said Shameza Abdulla, UNICEF’s senior emergency coordinator in the DRC, based in Goma.
According to this official, there is also a risk that the epidemic will continue to “spread into internally displaced areas, where systems are already overwhelmed and populations – especially children – are highly vulnerable to disease and – possibly – death”.
In 2017, a cholera epidemic swept all regions of the country, including the capital Kinshasa, with nearly 55,000 cases and more than 1,100 deaths, it said.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, nearly a million new displaced people were identified in the first quarter of 2023 amid an outbreak of deadly violence in the east of the country, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in mid-June. .
“The camps for displaced people are generally overcrowded and congested, which encourages cholera transmission,” UNICEF notes.
The organization needs $62.5 million to step up its cholera epidemic prevention and response activities over the next five months to help 1.8 million people, including 1 million children, it said, adding added that the call is currently only 9% funded. .
In North Kivu, populations are fleeing en masse from the violence sparked by the resurgence of the M23 rebellion, a predominantly Tutsi movement that took up arms again in late 2021 and seized large areas of northern Goma.