Nurse Amir Rashid at the cholera ward in Bebnine with a young patient. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT — Lebanon recorded Tuesday night 10 new cases of cholera and no new deaths in the last 24 hours, while the total number of new confirmed and suspected cases stands at 186, the Health Ministry said in its daily report.
According to the report, Lebanon has so far recorded 400 confirmed cases since the beginning of its first cholera outbreak since 1993 on Oct. 5.
The outbreak spread from neighboring Syria, as it experiences a severe outbreak of cholera, recording more than 20,000 suspected cases and 75 deaths, according to Edouard Beigbeder, UNICEF’s representative in Lebanon.
“Cholera is just other thing they try to blame on the Syrians,” one man in a hospital in Bebnine, Akkar told L'Orient Today. “But this has nothing to do with nationality, it’s about a lack of infrastructure.”
"As early as July 2022, well before the detection of the first case of cholera in Syria, we warned against the collapse of sanitary conditions in Lebanon over the past two years, and the increase in E. coli and diarrheal infections, aggravating factors in the deterioration of child health,” Beigbeder told L'Orient Today.
Last week caretaker Health Minister Firass Abiad called on the caretaker Finance Minister Youssef Khalil and urged him to grant public health employees “the financial aid in cash previously promised" as the Lebanese lira has lost more than 90 percent of its value, which resulted in the dropping of the value of the health workers' salaries.