While Malawi’s outbreak was spreading across its borders to Zambia and Mozambique, hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan reported cholera symptoms amid a massive monsoon season that left a third of the country fully underwater. And in Nigeria, cases spiked after over a million people were displaced by extreme flooding during the 2022 rainy season.
“With a severe shortage of water, the remaining sources become easily contaminated, because everyone is using them for everything,” Ramadan said. “We have seen that in the greater Horn of Africa.”Article content He added that destructive storms in the past have not led to massive cholera outbreaks at the scale of the recent epidemic in Malawi, so it’s important to also consider other factors.
“But one of the big mechanisms by which extreme events will impact cholera risk is the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure,” he said. “That is an important point, because we can block those impacts if we invest in .” Ramadan says that’s in large part because the ongoing cholera response already occurring in Malawi’s southern region — high vaccination rates, advanced distribution of water tablets and supplies, and messaging around cholera — reduced transmission in spite of the direct impacts to infrastructure.