25,000 wounded each month in Syria, cholera feared: WHO

PanARMENIAN.Net - About 25,000 people are wounded each month in escalating warfare in Syria and it getting harder to deliver medical supplies for civilians trapped in areas held by Islamic State insurgents, the World Health Organization said on Friday, November 13, according to Reuters.

It said typhoid and diarrhea are on the rise due to the lack of clean water and with winter setting in, more acute respiratory infections are expected especially among children and the elderly. On top of that, there were concerns that deadly cholera could spread into Syria from Iraq.

About 250,000 Syrians have been killed in 4 1/2 years of civil war with 11.5 million driven from their homes.

"The main concern is of course communicable diseases, but also trauma cases. We have more than 25,000 newly injured per month in Syria and the system is overburdened," Elizabeth Hoff, WHO representative in Syria, told a news briefing in Geneva.

At least 60 percent of Syria's 113 public hospitals and 50 percent of the 1,783 primary health care centers have closed or been partially destroyed in the conflict since March 2011, according to the WHO's latest update.

The WHO has no contact with Islamic State forces controlling territory where an estimated 1.7 million Syrians live but has managed to deliver small amounts of medical supplies to a network of doctors there, she said.

There has been no confirmed case of cholera in Syria, but an epidemic in neighboring Iraq has infected 2,671 people since September and spread to Kuwait and Bahrain, according to WHO.

"Cholera is a high risk (in Syria), particularly after the outbreak that we have seen in Iraq ... We are facing this by deploying rapid diagnostic tests into many of the areas but access is not easy," Hoff said.

Areas in Syria most vulnerable to a spread of cholera were primarily in the north and northeast including Deir al-Zor, al Hassakah, Raqqa, Aleppo and Idlib.