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he Mozambican health authorities recorded, between October 2023 and July 2024, 38 deaths from cholera.
Prime Minister Adriano Maleiane revealed the data, at the opening of the first Transdisciplinary Scientific Conference to Stop Cholera, and to eliminate the disease by 2030, held in Maputo on Monday.
He said that, over the past nine months, around 16,000 cases of cholera were recorded in Mozambique and this reactivated the alert in the country, as well as in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as a whole.
“In order to reduce the number of cases, the health authorities have vaccinated 5.2 million people against cholera in the most affected districts over the last three years’, Maleiane said.
“We believe that vaccination campaigns, when combined with other measures, have a positive impact on cholera prevention and control’, he stressed. “We therefore take this opportunity to encourage cooperation partners and other stakeholders to ensure the increased provision and availability of cholera vaccines’.
Maleiane explained that among the various factors that influence the spread of cholera are the frequency of extreme weather events, poor sanitation, limited access to drinking water and misinformation about the real causes of the disease.
Between January and March this year, 94,000 cases of cholera were recorded worldwide, more than half of which were in the SADC region. Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia are the most affected countries.
“On the African continent there were just over 250,000 cases of cholera between 2023 and the present, resulting in more than 4,000 deaths, which corresponds to a lethality rate of 1.6 per cent’, Maleiane said.
The representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Mozambique, Severin Von Xylander, said that armed conflicts, unplanned urbanization and climate change increase the risk of cholera “and researchers have estimated that every year there are 1.3 to four million cases of cholera and 21,000 to 143,000 deaths worldwide.’
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