MSF warns of risk of malaria spread increasingly in Yemen

Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), on Sunday warned of the increasing risk of malaria spread in Yemen, in conjunction with the rainy season.

“With the onset of the rainy season, the risk of malaria in Yemen increases,” the organization’s office in Yemen said Sunday in a tweet on Twitter, on the occasion of World Malaria Day.

“As Yemen is currently preparing for a possible spread of COVID-19, the health system needs to continue to work, otherwise we can expect an increase in deaths due to other diseases such as malaria,” the organization added.

The organization considered that “the treatment of malaria sufferers places a great burden on the exhausted health system in Yemen due to the war and the blockade for five years, which threatens the lives of many Yemenis, especially children and pregnant women.”

The organization indicated that it had treated 13,093 cases of malaria in a number of Yemeni governorates in 2019.

The Yemeni provinces are witnessing heavy rains, which caused streaming torrents that resulted in dozens of casualties, in addition to large losses in public and private property.

YPA