SANAA, July 12 (Xinhua) -- UN aid agencies will likely be forced to shift resources used for fighting malnutrition to contain the spread of cholera in war-torn Yemen, said a UN official late Tuesday.
"Unless the international community contributes 200 million U.S. dollars to address the cholera outbreak in Yemen, the UN aid agencies will be forced to reprogram more resources tagged for malnutrition in the country," Jamie McGoldrick, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, was quoted as saying.
"This unprecedented cholera epidemic would further weaken the resources, and the resilience that people had had over the last two and a half years of this war," McGoldrick added.
Cholera in Yemen, which is also suffering famine, has so far infected 313,538 people and killed 1,732, according to the latest figures from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
About 40 percent of the suspected cases and a quarter of the deaths were among children under 15, particularly the malnourished. Older adults, pregnant women and people with chronic health conditions have faced the greatest risk of death, OCHA data showed.
The top UN aid official said the cholera is "entirely man-made as a result of the conflict."
The UN's response failed to keep pace with the cholera spread mainly because it "did not have enough resources to expand their operations into areas, where health workers were working without pay."
The UN has collected only one third of the 2.1 billion dollars it needs to provide food to the millions of people facing famine in Yemen. Separately, a funding appeal for 250 million dollars to fight cholera in the country received only 47 million dollars.
"Agencies have had to use resources which they had programmed otherwise, for example for food security or malnutrition," McGoldrick lamented.
Meanwhile, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said it's considering shelving the shipment of cholera vaccines to Yemen.
"A vaccination way ahead of an outbreak would be useful, but that would imply a huge amount of vaccines, taking into account all the countries where cholera was endemic," WHO Spokesman Christian Lindmeier was quoted as saying.
Since April 27, the cholera cases in Yemen have been "increasing at an average of 5,000 a day," WHO said in its latest weekly report.
"We are now facing the worst cholera outbreak in the world," it said.
More than three years into the war, Yemen is on the brink of a total collapse, where two thirds of the total population, around 19 million, need humanitarian aid. About 10.3 million are at risk of famine and 14.5 million lack access to safe drinking water.
Fewer than 45 percent of Yemen's hospitals are operational, but even the operational ones are coping with huge challenges, especially the lack of medications, medical equipment and staff.
The blockade on Yemen, as part of a Saudi-led bombing campaign launched in March 2015, has deepened the crisis in the country which used to import most of its basic needs.
The war has pit the Iranian-allied Shiite Houthi rebel movement against a Sunni Saudi-led military coalition, after Houthis toppled Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government in late 2014.
