Three health organisations including the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have temporarily suspended their activities in Yirol East County following an attack that killed two people and wounded three others including an IOM health officer last week, a local official said.

Yirol East County Commissioner Majok Chur told Radio Tamazuj on Wednesday that the three organizations decided to suspend their activities on cholera response in the area due to insecurity.

“The big problem is that, all the organizations that were working in Shambe have suspended their operations and nobody supplied medicines to the area after the incident that happened on the road last week when some of their health workers were attacked between Shambe and Yirol town by unknown gunmen, so they stopped due to fear of insecurity,” he said.

He said the cholera outbreak is worsening after the organizations stopped their activities. The local official commissioner pointed out three more patients were admitted to the hospital in Shambe town over the past two days, adding that they have not yet received any report on cholera cases in the remote areas.

For her part, IOM’s Media and Communication Officer in South Sudan, Ashley Mclaughin, said at the time of the attack, the IOM team remained with a few days to complete its mission and already in the midst of handing over the health response to local partners including the state health ministry.

Ashley stated that their health response team on cholera was deployed for about four weeks during the emergency to scale up response and support the capacity of the local partners on the ground.

She pointed that her organization had already managed to rehabilitate 23 boreholes to provide safe drinking water to 11,500 people and also distributed water purification tablets, buckets, soap and other hygiene promotion items that reached about 25,000 people. 

Photo:Yirol East County (Retrieved from Google Maps)