Cholera has re-emerged in Iraq after seven years

Revived at Iraq cholera, after the 2005 epidemic, without any deaths yet, according to health authorities. Thirteen cases were reported, ten in Sulaymaniyah, in the autonomous region of Kurdistan.

“Ten cases of cholera have been reported in the province,” Sabah Hawrami, the director general of health in Sulaymaniyah, whose capital of about one million people, said in a news conference.

According to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, two more cases were reported in al-Mutana in the south and the thirteenth in Kirkuk in the north.

Another 56 suspected cases have been reported in Sulaymaniyah province and samples are being analyzed in a Baghdad laboratory, the only one in the country capable of making a diagnosis.

Diarrhea and vomiting

Over the past ten days, “approximately 4,000 cases of patients with diarrhea and vomiting have been reported in hospitals in Sulaymaniyah,” according to Dr. Hawrami. “Cholera is a terrible disease, but it can be cured very easily. “We can save lives in a few hours,” he said.

A case was reported in Sulaymaniyah cholera since 2012. In 2015 a cholera epidemic hit Baghdad and the province of Babylon, south of the capital, infecting hundreds of people.

Cholera, a disease that causes acute diarrhea and dehydration and can kill within hours without treatment, is spread by ingesting or absorbing contaminated water or eating food contaminated with the vibrio cholerae bacterium.

The disease often occurs in residential areas with limited access to drinking water or lack of sewerage networks.

At the beginning of 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that between 1.3 and 1.4 million cases of cholera and 21,000 to 143,000 deaths from the disease were recorded worldwide each year.