Posted on: Tue 09-11-2021

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) has disclosed that about 90,000 Nigerians contracted cholera in 2021.

MSF stated this in a statement yesterday jointly signed by its field communication officers, Hussein Amri and Abdulkareem Yakub

It said though nearly all of Nigeria’s 36 states had reported cholera cases in 2021, the six Northern states of Bauchi, Kano, Jigawa, Zamfara, Sokoto and Katsina were the hardest hit.

“The population of this region is already extremely vulnerable; hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes by conflict and violence, and most live in conditions with poor sanitation and no safe drinking water,” the statement read in part.

MSF said its emergency teams were working alongside the Federal Ministry of Health to curb the spread of the disease. It said it had opened six cholera treatment centres across the region and that more than 20,000 patients had been treated. The humanitarian organisation, however, said acute insecurity had affected treatment of patients in some hard-hit areas.

“In Zamfara State, many patients arrived in a serious or critical condition, having delayed seeking treatment for fear of encountering violence or danger on the roads.

“Despite this, MSF teams were still admitting more than 100 patients daily at some points in August, underscoring the severity of the outbreak and the determination of patients to get treatment, however risky.

“Vulnerable populations in Nigeria were already in a dire situation. Cholera has added to a complex web of medical and humanitarian vulnerabilities, coming on top of heightened insecurity, a chronic state of acute humanitarian and medical needs, and the direct and secondary impacts of COVID-19,” Dr Simba Tirima, MSF country representative in Nigeria, was quoted as saying.

At the peak of the outbreak in July, the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control reported more than 7,500 new cases per week.

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