Via The Washington Post: Cholera fears prompt quarantine in Ukraine's Mariupol; country prepares for disease outbreaks. Excerpt:
In Mariupol — the ruined and Russian-occupied port city in Ukraine’s southeast — fears of constant bombardment have given way to silent threats: Bacteria-laced water and deadly cholera outbreaks.
The city’s exiled local leaders have voiced concern about the water supply for weeks, and on Monday, mayoral aide Petro Andryushchenko said that decomposing bodies and piles of garbage are contaminating drinking sources, leaving residents vulnerable to cholera, dysentery and other ailments.
The Russian officials now running the city recently imposed a quarantine, Andryushchenko said in an appearance on Ukrainian television. He did not elaborate on the measures, and his statement could not be independently verified, but he said the humanitarian situation there was getting worse.
“Spontaneous burials are still in almost every yard in Mariupol,” the city council wrote in an update on Telegram. “Bodies are rotting under the rubble of hundreds of high-rise buildings. And it literally poisons the air.”
Public health experts have warned that warming weather and prolonged warfare could expose Ukraine — its soldiers and civilians — to infectious diseases, potentially ushering in a new phase of the conflict that forces authorities to contend with outbreaks of illness while fending off Russia’s invasion. The most at-risk areas, officials have said, are the country’s occupied regions, where long bouts of fighting have left sanitation systems in ruins.
Cholera, which spreads through contaminated food and water, is an acute diarrhoeal infection that can be fatal if left untreated.
The Mariupol council predicted thousands more civilian deaths if an outbreak were to rage uncontrolled, which would bring more tragedy to a city that has already endured some of the most brutal bombing of the Russian campaign. The near-constant shelling, which allowed Moscow to claim full control of Mariupol last month, reduced much of the city to rubble and has destroyed water and sewer infrastructure, along with medical facilities, the council said.
To get access to clean water, Mariupol residents must queue for hours, Andryushchenko said on Telegram, and it has only been available every two days at most.
In a news briefing Monday, Ukraine’s chief sanitary doctor, Ihor Kuzin, said national authorities began monitoring potential cholera outbreaks across the country on June 1. He said Mariupol’s situation is especially dire.
“We can’t be 100 percent sure that there will be disease outbreaks,” he said. “But all prerequisites for them are already there.”
