Cholera prevention measures reduce transmission among displaced people in South Sudan
When violence erupted in South Sudan at the end of 2013, tens of thousands of people fleeing the conflict sought refuge in United Nations bases positioned around the country in the hope that peacekeepers stationed there would protect them. The bases were quickly overwhelmed, with families crammed together with little or no access to safe water or sanitation.
Then the rainy season approached, increasing the risk of water-borne diseases, in particular cholera, which is endemic to the country – with the potential for explosive outbreaks in the congested camps.
Yet when a cholera outbreak was declared in South Sudan five months later, the displaced people living in the makeshift camps at UN sites were largely unaffected, with little or no transmission of cholera.
A timely decision to initiate prevention and control measures, including pre-emptively vaccinating displaced people in UN sites with oral cholera vaccine (OCV), almost certainly averted increased illness and death amongst the vulnerable camp inhabitants who had been at high-risk of the disease.