The World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners recommended today that the countries of the world temporarily use only one dose of cholera vaccine instead of two, as is usual, and the reason for the shortage is that the number of epidemics of water-borne diseases has increased worldwide.
A statement today from the WHO and its partners such as Unicef and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent said that a single dose of the vaccine has been shown to be effective in halting outbreaks "even if evidence on the exact duration of protection is limited".
WHO and partner organizations manage a stockpile of cholera vaccines, from where they are distributed free of charge to countries that need them.
"This measure is the last option to avoid facing an impossible choice: to which country to send vaccine doses and to which not," said Danijela Garone, international coordinator in the organization Médecins Sans Frontières.
According to her, "one dose of the vaccine will provide shorter protection, but it is a fair and equitable way to try to protect as many people as possible in a situation where we are facing multiple cholera epidemics at the same time".
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that cholera sometimes kills on the same day a person is infected and warned that the spread of the infectious disease in 29 countries this year is putting "unprecedented pressure" on the world's limited reserves of cholera vaccine.
According to him, production must be increased and "restrictions must not be more than a temporary solution".
The WHO has said that countries such as Haiti, Malawi and Syria are struggling to stop large outbreaks of cholera, and that climate change could make outbreaks of the disease more common, as the bacteria that cause it multiply faster in warm water.
Due to global warming, the waters on the planet are getting warmer.
In 2010, cholera killed almost 10 thousand people in Haiti, and it was introduced there by United Nations peacekeeping forces.
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