“More than 85,000 cases of cholera in West and Central Africa are making this one of the region’s most severe epidemics in recent memory,” VOA News reports. “Grant Leaity, UNICEF’s chief of emergency operations for West and Central Africa, says the epidemic is due, in part, to a greater movement of people across the region,” VOA writes, noting, “Three simultaneous cross-border outbreaks are affecting people in two dozen countries along the coast from Guinea, and in the Lake Chad basin to the West Congo basin and around Lake Tanganyika.”

“While aid agencies are working to improve cross-border disease surveillance, Leaity said stopping cholera starts with government health ministries improving prevention and treatment,” VOA notes. “Despite its rapid spread, the [WHO] says 90 percent of cholera cases and deaths are in just five countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana,” the news service writes (Stearns, 10/17).