In Yemen, Oxfam is warning the spiraling cholera outbreak could become “the largest ever recorded in any country in a single year since records began.” The World Health Organization says as many as 5,000 Yemenis are being infected every day and that the disease will only spread further as the rainy season begins. The cholera outbreak comes as more than two years of U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing in Yemen has devastated the country’s health, water and sanitation systems. This is U.N. human rights agency spokesperson Rupert Colville.
Rupert Colville: “The fighting, hugely exacerbating the ability to stop this epidemic of cholera, and also the kind of disintegration of the health system in Yemen, as a result of the conflict, at a time of cholera, is an absolutely lethal combination.”
We’ll go to Yemen for more on the cholera epidemic and the U.S.-backed bombing campaign later in the broadcast.