Climate's Clear Connect

Malawi is in the throes of its worst-ever cholera outbreak right after three cyclonic events hit the African country in 2022. Nigeria faces the same scourge after its heaviest floods in a decade last year. Kenya's most severe drought in four decades has also been followed by a cholera outbreak. Africa offers numerous cases that show how climate events trigger and exacerbate diseases.

- Kiran Pandey, Winnie Botha, Bennett Oghifo, Tony Malesi. Ngala Killian Chimtom, Leah Kahunde Ndung'u, Mekonnen Teshome

ON FEBRUARY 13 this year, President Lazarus Chakwera of Malawi launched a national campaign that carried the gravity of a battle cry: “Tithetse kolera (End Cholera)”. He spoke from Mgona, one of the cholera hotspots in capital city Lilongwe, as patients were ferried to health centres. He declared that the landlocked southeastern African nation’s immediate challenge was to reduce the fatality rate of the current cholera outbreak from 3.2 per cent to the global average of about 1 per cent by the end of the month.

The acute diarrhoeal infection, caused by consuming food or water contaminated with bacterium Vibrio cholerae, has been endemic to Malawi since 1998, when the country reported its first major outbreak of the disease. Cases remained confined to the flood-prone southern districts, occurring usually during the rainy season of November-May. But the current outbreak is unprecedentedly protracted—it started in the southern district of Machinga in March 2022 and by February 2023, had spread to all the 29 districts of the country, infecting 36,940 people and killing more than 1,200, as per February 9, 2023 update by the World Health Organization (who). “This is the deadliest outbreak of cholera in the country’s history,” says who in a statement.

What makes the outbreak a matter of concern is that the current surge in cases comes after the country had managed to bring down cholera cases to just two in 2021.