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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have discovered that cholera, the most severe in the history of Yemen, came from East Africa and probably would have reached the migrants.
Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Institut Pasteur in France have used gene sequencing techniques and are now better able to assess the risk of future cholera spread in areas such as Yemen, giving more time for the authorities to intervene.
"Knowing how cholera spreads around the world gives us an opportunity to better prepare ourselves for future outbreaks," said Nick Thompson, professor at the Sanger Institute and at the London School of Hygiene and Medicine. tropical that co-sponsored the study.
Nearly four years of war between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthi group allied with Iran have paralyzed health care systems in Yemen: about 1.2 million cases of cholera have been reported since 2017 and 2,515 deaths.
The World Health Organization (WHO) warned in October that the spread of cholera was again on the rise, with around 10,000 suspected cases being reported each week, double the average of the first eight months of 2018.
To study the origins of the spread, the Sanger Institute and the Pasteur Institute have carried out a genetic sequence of samples of cholera bacteria collected in Yemen and in neighboring areas.
This included samples from a Yemeni refugee center at the Saudi border and including 74 other cholera samples from South Asia, the Middle East and East and Central Africa.
The team, whose findings were released Wednesday in the journal Nature, compared these sequences to a global group of more than 1,000 cholera samples and concluded that the strain causing the epidemic in Yemen is a strain identified for the first time in 2012 in South Asia and that it has spread all over the world.
However, the researchers found that the Yemeni strain did not come directly from South Asia, but spread and caused waves of infection in East Africa in 2013 and 2014 before appearing. in Yemen in 2016.
"Genomics has allowed us to discover that the cholera strain responsible for the devastating epidemic in Yemen is probably related to the migration of people from East Africa to Yemen," said Thompson.
But he added that the available samples did not allow the team to determine exactly where the strain originated in East Africa.
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