Medical experts say Africa faces worst cholera outbreak in 25 years

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.