Weeks after massive Cyclone Freddy slammed into Mozambique for a second time, the still-flooded country is facing a spiraling cholera outbreak that threatens to add to the devastation.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as of 27 March there were more than 19,000 confirmed cases of cholera in Mozambique’s eight provinces, a figure that had almost doubled in a week.
Freddy was possibly the longest-lived cyclone ever recorded, 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 its second landfall in Mozambique’s Zambezia province, where hundreds of villages have been inundated and water supplies are still contaminated.
At a hospital in Quelimane, Zambezia’s provincial capital, Eduardo Sam Gudo Jr., director general of the National Institute of Health, told the Quelimane district alone that there were 600 new confirmed cases a day but said the real number could exceed 1,000.
At least 31 people died of cholera in Zambezia, and more than 3,200 were hospitalised between March 15 and 29, according to figures from the health ministry.
Cases are highest in the neighbourhood of Icidua, on the outskirts of the city, where most residents live in bamboo or adobe mud huts and fetch water in buckets from communal wells. Flooding brought by the cyclone has exposed many of these wells to water contaminated with sewage overflow and other sources of bacteria. Cholera spreads through faeces, often when it gets into drinking water.
But until the water pipelines ruptured in the floods are repaired, these wells are the only source of water for those in Icidua and communities like it. For now, temporary solutions offer the only hope of stemming the outbreak.
Volunteers go from house to house distributing bottles of Certeza, a local chlorine-based water purifier. Each bottle should last a family for a week, but supplies are running low as local production struggles to keep pace with demand. There are also not enough people to distribute the Certeza, even if greater supplies could be procured, Gudo said.
In the meantime, health workers are struggling to treat the infected, with many clinics and hospitals badly damaged. “The cyclone destroyed the infrastructure here,” said José da Costa Silva, the clinical director of the Icidua health centre.
“We are working in parts of the hospital that were not destroyed. Some colleagues are working outside in the open because there’s not enough space available for everyone.”
Eighty health centers in total were affected by Freddy’s two landfalls in Mozambique, according to INGD, the country’s disaster management agency. Although cyclones do occur in southern Africa from December to May, human-caused climate change has made tropical cyclones wetter, more intense, and more frequent.
The now-dissipated natural La Nina event also worsened cyclone activity in the region. While Cyclone Freddy itself hasn’t yet been attributed to climate change, researchers say it has all the hallmarks of a warming-fueled weather event.