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QUELIMANE: Weeks after massive Cyclone Freddy hit Mozambique for the second time, the still-flooded country is facing a spiraling cholera outbreak that threatens to intensify the devastation.
More than 19,000 cases of cholera had been confirmed in Mozambique’s eight provinces as of March 27, a figure that had nearly doubled in a week, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Freddy may be the longest-lasting hurricane on record, lasting more than five weeks and hitting Mozambique twice. The tropical storm killed 165 people in Mozambique, 17 in Madagascar and 676 in Malawi. Two weeks later, more than 530 people are still missing in Malawi, so the death toll in the country could exceed 1,200.
Freddy made landfall for the second time in Mozambique’s Zambézia province, where many villages are still flooded and water supplies are still polluted.
At a hospital in Quelimane, the provincial capital of Zambezia, National Institutes of Health Director Eduardo Sam Gudo Jr. reported 600 new confirmed cases a day in Quelimane alone, but said the real figure could be as high as 1000 cases.
At least 31 people died of cholera in Zambezia between March 15 and 29 and more than 3,200 were hospitalized, according to the Ministry of Health.
Cases are highest in the Icidua community on the outskirts of the city, where most residents live in bamboo or adobe mud huts and fetch water from public wells in buckets. Flooding from the hurricane exposed many of these wells to water contaminated by sewage overflows and other sources of bacteria. Cholera is spread through feces, usually when it gets into drinking water.
But until water pipes ruptured in the flood are repaired, the wells are the only source of water for residents of Icidua and similar communities. For now, temporary solutions are the only hope of containing the outbreak.
Volunteers went door-to-door to distribute bottles of Certeza, a local chlorine-based water filter. Each bottle is supposed to last a family for a week, but supplies are dwindling as local production struggles to keep up with demand. Even if more supplies could be procured, there won’t be enough people to distribute Certeza, Gudo said.
Meanwhile, many clinics and hospitals have been severely damaged as health workers struggle to treat the infected. “The hurricane destroyed the infrastructure here,” said Jose da Costa Silva, clinical director of the Icidua Health Center. “We are working in the undamaged part of the hospital. Some colleagues are working outside in the open air because there is not enough space for everyone.”
A total of 80 health centers were affected by Freddy’s two landfalls in Mozambique, according to the country’s disaster management agency INGD.
Although cyclones do occur in southern Africa from December to May, human-caused climate change is making tropical cyclones wetter, more intense, and more frequent. The now-dissipated natural La Niña also boosted cyclonic activity in the region. While Hurricane Freddy itself has not been attributed to climate change, researchers say it has all the right hallmarks of a warming weather event.
Forming off the coast of Australia in early February, the cyclone was unusually long-lived, spanning more than 8,000 kilometers from east to west across the Indian Ocean for an unprecedented amount of time.
It followed a circular path rarely documented by meteorologists, first hitting Madagascar and Mozambique in late February and then hitting Malawi again in March.
Restoring normal water supplies in Mozambique will take time, as many areas traversed by damaged pipes remain inaccessible two weeks after the cyclone last impacted.
“Cholera outbreaks in flooded plains with very high water tables are ‘mission impossible,'” Mirta
said Collard, the United Nations resident coordinator in Mozambique.
“Sanitation is a big issue and flooding has affected critical infrastructure such as water pipes and electricity supply … Repairing infrastructure in flooded areas is another ‘mission impossible’.”
Meanwhile, rural areas around Quelimane face other threats. Many villages and fields are still underwater, and the damp breeds swarms of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. According to local chief Hilario Milisto Iraqe, 290 residents of a makeshift camp for displaced people on the bank of a flooded rice field near the village of Nicoadala 20 of them had malaria.
On March 24 alone, 444 malaria cases were reported in the Quelimane region, but the number is likely to be much higher because many people, such as those in the outer camp of Nicodara, do not have access to medical facilities.
The attack on Freddy on the eve of the main harvest compounded the public health crisis and put the material livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people at risk. It also brings seawater inland, threatening the long-term fertility of soils in areas where malnutrition already persists.
“All our farms are flooded. Our rice fields are destroyed. All we can do is start over, but we don’t know how we’re going to do that,” Irawe said.
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