For the first time since 2009, cholera, an acute diarrheal infection, reappeared in early September in Syria where around two-thirds of water treatment plants, half of pumping stations and a third of water towers were damaged by eleven years of war, according to the UN, which speaks of “worst epidemic the country has seen in years”.
If it is difficult to obtain precise figures, the country being divided and under the control of different armed groups, the very partial censuses report more than 10,000 suspected cases and around forty deaths since the end of August. The problem is in particular that the patients are diagnosed very little because they do not have access to a doctor. More than three quarters of Syrians depend on humanitarian aid to survive and millions of them live in camps for internally displaced people.
Hygiene and access to water are very precarious there, which explains the very rapid spread of the epidemic. Nearly half of the population in Syria depends on alternative and often dangerous water sources, while at least 70% of wastewater is untreated, UNICEF points out. “Cholera represents an immense danger for the region, because it is easily transmitted by physical contact, the vegetables we eat, the waterexplains Hammadi, who works for the NGO MedGlobal in northern Syria. Things that people do every day.”
If the bacteria responsible for cholera thrive, it is because the water in Syria is very polluted. After 11 years of a war that killed half a million people and ravaged the country, the water treatment infrastructure is out of service. Between the tents of the camps for the displaced, children play in puddles of stagnant water and therefore easily catch cholera. Adults are also affected. “I started to feel very weak and to have violent diarrhea and I was vomiting a lot.says Ahmad Moussa who lives in the north of the country, near the Turkish border. I went to the hospital to be examined. They tested me and the result was positive.”
Ahmad Moussa got out of trouble because an association took him in charge. But the fear of NGOs is not enough drugs if the epidemic continues to progress. And without humanitarian aid, the sick will not be able to get treatment, because treatment is prohibitively expensive for most of them. Nine out of 10 Syrians live on less than two euros a day.