Inside Yemen: Cholera and breakdown of healthcare add to country's plight

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Moving to Yemen, where three years of fighting has created one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters. The country is facing the largest cholera outbreak in modern times, and experts fear it could get worse. CGTN's Natalie Carney has more from the war-torn country.

This is Samira and 3-year-old Omar. They are twins. They both have cholera.

MOTHER OF TWINS WITH CHOLERA "At first the kids were playing in dirty places, then they got diarrhea. And because the children are playing together, it goes from one to the other."

The family are refugees from Somalia and live in a makeshift space in Aden with no sanitary facilities. The children spend their time outside playing with other neighbourhood kids in bare feet.

Just down the road, 4-year-old Abdulrizza also has cholera. This neighbourhood registers the highest number of cholera cases in all of Aden.

Every day, health advisor Gemel Abdu Mohamed Abu Bakir goes around to educate mothers about proper protective measures, such as hygiene.

JAMEL ABDU MOHAMED ABU BAKIR HEALTH ADVISOR "We enter people's houses to educate them about hygiene, and to tell them if there is a case of diarrhea, they have to come to the hospital to be cured. If you keep them an hour, two hours at home, this hour may be fatal for him. An hour leads to death, half an hour can lead to death."

"Hello Hayat? How are you?"

The cholera ward at Al Sadaka Hospital has seen an increase in patients within the last month.

DR. MANAL SALEM CHOLERA DEPARTMENT, AL SADAKA HOSPITAL "In August it was only 3, 4 cases a day, but yesterday it was 20 cases just in the morning. The main problem is the lack of water. Water is not available. Even we are suffering from that at home. Water is very rare. We get water only a few hours a day."

More than 1 million people had cholera between 2016 and 2018. Nearly 2400 of them died; a far cry from rough annual count of 17 and a half thousand registered with the disease prior to the war.

NATALIE CARNEY ADEN, YEMEN "According to the United Nations, 275,000 people were vaccinated against cholera earlier this year in Aden alone. Yet the rate at which people are getting infected is increasing and cholera cases are also being seen in areas previously unaffected."

Challenging the situation further is the deplorable state of health care facilities in the country, which too have become victims of the fighting.

In June a brand new cholera treatment centre run by Doctors without Borders was hit by an air strike.

A struggling economy has forced many hospitals to close across the country or work on bare minimum, such as this children's cancer ward.

DR. JAMEL PEDIATRICIAN WARD "We have shortage of nurse, we haven't enough doctors. The war has totally affected all aspects of the life. The price of everything here, because of this crisis, is increasing too much."

Most patients are not able to finish their chemotherapy treatment due to the unaffordability of it or simply access to it.

"You come here and there is no medicine. There are no needles. You've seen how dirty this place is, the smell, the place stinks. They are not even able to repair the lift. The NGOs give money, but we don't see where that money goes. It doesn't reach us."

The good news is that care and awareness for Cholera is improving across Yemen, but health care, in general, has become one of the most detrimental casualties of this war.

Natalie Carney, CGTN Aden, Yemen.