Category World News

Africa is experiencing its worst outbreak of cholera in the past 25 years, with Angola and Burundi seeing renewed surges that suggest active transmission of the disease, according to African medical officials.

On Thursday, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a public health agency for the African Union, said it had recorded about 300,000 confirmed and suspected cases of cholera so far in 2025. In addition, it had logged more than 7,000 deaths.

The figures show an increase of more than 30 percent over the total number of cases recorded last year, which was 254,075.

“Cholera is still a major issue,” Africa CDC Director General Jean Kaseya said in a news briefing on Thursday. “It’s like every year we have more and more cases.”

Kaseya told reporters that two countries in particular have shown increases, suggesting active transmission of the infection: Angola and Burundi.

Angola has seen at least 33,563 total cases of cholera so far in 2025, resulting in 866 deaths, and Burundi has experienced at least 2,380 cases, leading to 10 deaths.

Cholera is a bacterial disease usually spread when people drink contaminated water or have contact with the water through open wounds. In some cases, it is possible to become infected when eating raw shellfish.

It cannot be transmitted from person to person, so casual contact with a person who has the disease is not a risk.

The disease causes severe diarrhoea and dehydration. If the disease is left untreated, cholera can kill within hours — even among people who were previously healthy.

The Africa CDC blamed the rise of the disease on poor access to safe water and conflicts across the continent.

“As we know, without water, we cannot really control the outbreak,” Kaseya said Thursday.

Even in countries that have seen slight declines in cholera cases, Kaseya encouraged health officials to address the root causes, including overcrowding and poor sanitation in refugee camps.

“Insecurity, displacement of our populations — all of that are not helping, in addition to a lack of wash commodities,” he said.

As of August, at least 40 people had died from cholera in Sudan’s Darfur region, with local refugee camps hit particularly hard.

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, described the situation as the country’s worst outbreak in years.

The war in Sudan has damaged and destroyed much of the country’s civilian infrastructure, including sewage and water treatment works, and turned many places, including the capital Khartoum, into battlefields.

“On top of an all-out war, people in Sudan are now experiencing the worst cholera outbreak the country has seen in years,” MSF said in a statement in August, cited by the AFP news agency.

“In the Darfur region alone, MSF teams treated over 2,300 patients and recorded 40 deaths in the past week.”

In total, Sudan has experienced at least 71,728 cases of cholera in 2025, resulting in 2,012 deaths, according to the Africa CDC.

Canada is hoping to rebuild ties with major trading partner India, its trade minister said, as the two countries seek to turn the page on a years-long diplomatic row linked to the killing of a Canadian Sikh activist.

Canadian International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu told Reuters on Thursday that he had a productive meeting with Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal in New Delhi.

“The meeting went really well. We focused on areas of opportunity — aerospace, AI, critical minerals, energy, agriculture — and what more we can do together,” Sidhu, who is on a three-day trip to India, said after the talks.

The minister’s visit marks one of the highest-level trade engagements between Canada and India since negotiations on a bilateral pact were halted in 2023 over accusations that India was involved in the killing of a Canadian Sikh separatist leader.

The Canadian prime minister at the time, Justin Trudeau, had said there were “credible links” between the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s assassination in the province of British Columbia in June 2023.

New Delhi vehemently denied the allegations, which prompted both governments to expel each other’s diplomats. India also suspended visa services in Canada.

Despite the accusations, Trudeau’s successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, has sought to re-establish ties with India since his government came into office earlier this year.

Carney met Modi on the sidelines of the G7 summit in June in the Canadian province of Alberta.

The two leaders “reaffirmed the importance of Canada-India ties, based upon mutual respect, the rule of law, and a commitment to the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity”, according to a readout of the discussions released by Carney’s office.

“The leaders agreed to designate new high commissioners, with a view to returning to regular services to citizens and businesses in both countries.”

Thursday’s talks in New Delhi also come as both India and Canada face increased economic uncertainty spurred by United States President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs.

Sidhu, the Canadian trade minister, told Reuters that the Carney government was eager to enhance cooperation with India to attract investment in the energy and critical minerals sectors.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has doubled down on her government’s plans to send migrants and asylum seekers to detention centres in Albania, despite opposition from Italian judges and the European Union’s top court.

Speaking at a summit in Rome alongside Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, Meloni said her right-wing government was “determined” to forge ahead with its scheme of sending migrants and asylum seekers outside the EU while their claims are processed.

“Certainly, the protocol will work when the new [EU] migration and asylum pact comes into effect,” Meloni said on Thursday, citing a legal framework slated for 2026.

“When the migration and asylum pact comes into effect, the centres will operate exactly as they should have from the beginning.”

In a separate deal approved by the Albanian Parliament in February 2024, Albania agreed to hold up to 3,000 migrants and asylum seekers at any one time in two Italian-run processing centres located near the port of Shengjin.

Under the plan at the time, the migrants and asylum seekers would be held for periods of about a month. It was expected that up to 36,000 people a year could be sent from Italian custody to Albania over an initial period of five years.

According to the deal, people would be screened initially on board the ships that rescue them before being sent to Albania for further screening.

The centres were meant to be operated under Italian law with Italian security and staff. Italian judges would hear the immigration cases via video from Rome.

The agreement was denounced by rights groups, with the International Rescue Committee describing it as “dehumanising“. Amnesty International condemned it as “illegal and unworkable”.

As of August 1, Italy saw 36,557 migrant arrivals in 2025. That number is slightly up from the same period of 2024, but far below the 89,165 recorded over the same time span in 2023.

Following parliamentary approval, Italy sent its first ship carrying asylum seekers and migrants — 10 men from Bangladesh and six from Egypt — to Albania’s Shengjin port in October 2024.

But very quickly, four of the men were identified as “vulnerable” and sent back to Italy. Within two days, the remaining 12 men were sent back too, after an Italian court ruled against their detention.

Italy then sent ships of asylum seekers to Albania in January and April 2025, despite court challenges.

Meloni’s plan has been mired in legal challenges from the start. Italian judges have repeatedly rejected deportations from the centres, ruling that the asylum seekers’ countries of origin were not safe enough for them to be sent back.

The cases were referred to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which had earlier established that asylum applicants could not undergo a fast-track procedure for repatriation if their home countries were not deemed safe.

The ECJ ultimately backed Italian judges in a ruling in August, questioning Meloni’s list of “safe countries”.

Meloni’s government had issued a decree establishing a list of 19 supposedly safe countries of origin, which includes Egypt and Bangladesh. However, the EU has not classified either as a safe country of origin.

The ECJ said Italy is free to decide which countries are “safe”  but warned that such a designation should meet strict legal standards and allow applicants and courts to access and challenge the supporting evidence.

The ECJ also said a country might not be classified “safe” if it does not offer adequate protection to its entire population, agreeing with Italian judges who had raised the same issue last year.

Twelve-year-old Raghad al-Assar lay unconscious in a Gaza mortuary for eight hours after she was declared dead following an Israeli attack on her home in central Gaza last year.

“We were sitting in our home like everyone else when suddenly bullets, planes and drones came down on us,” she told Al Jazeera.

Al-Assar was saved by chance when a Palestinian man searching for his son’s body in the morgue saw the young girl’s fingers moving as she lay on a cold slab.

“I was in a coma for two weeks, and when I woke up, my family told me that I had been placed in the morgue refrigerator,” she recounted.

Two of al-Assar’s sisters were killed in the attack on June 8, 2024, and other members of her family were hurt as well.

“All my family was injured, and two of my sisters were martyred. My eldest sister’s condition is worse than mine. She can’t see in one eye, has burns, deep wounds and stomach problems,” al-Assar revealed.

Her story is one of the many to emerge from Israel’s war on Gaza, which United Nations experts have described as a genocide.

According to the UN Children’s Fund, some 64,000 children have “reportedly been killed or maimed” in Israeli attacks on coastal Palestinian territory.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 69,187 Palestinians and wounded 170,703 since its start in October 2023.

‘Changed her into another person’

Al-Assar’s father, Mohammed, was working when his house was attacked. A relative had called to tell him what happened.

“News came to me that my house was targeted. I was at work, not at home. I rushed from work to the hospital to check what happened,” he said.

“We went to the house to look for Raghad under the rubble. We did not find any sign of her.”

After he reunited with his daughter, Mohammed noticed the attack had completely changed her.

“The incident that occurred to her changed her mental health and personality into another person,” he explained. “There would be incidents where we walk on the street, where she faints while we’re walking on the street.”

Al-Assar told Al Jazeera she suffers from nightmares and anxiety whenever she recalls the day of the attack.

“I don’t like to remember, don’t want to hear war sounds, and avoid things that bring back memories. If I hear bombing or planes, I get frightened,” she said.

Her family is hoping to get al-Assar and her sister medical treatment abroad.

“I want to go abroad for treatment. That is my dream,” al-Assar said. “It is a child’s right to live just like other people abroad — for them to have play and have wellbeing.”

Two years of Israeli bombardment across Gaza have destroyed many health facilities and killed hundreds of medics, resulting in the collapse of the territory’s medical infrastructure.