Cholera Is Slaughtering Yemen and We’re Letting It Happen

Since April, more than 350,000 people have come down with cholera in Yemen, which has killed 1,790 of them. It is an appalling, inexcusable man-made disaster witnessed by a world that seems as impotent to stop the bacteria’s spread in the Middle East in 2017 as it was in post-earthquake Haiti in 2010. But the Haitian debacle, in which United Nations Peacekeepers carried the Vibrio cholerae in their bodies from Nepal, passing the bacteria into local streams to spawn a massive epidemic that continues today, spread in a nation shattered by natural disaster. There is nothing “natural” about the carnage of Yemen: This is war, waged from 10,000 feet by Saudi bombers that have damaged or destroyed every hospital, clinic, water treatment plant, pumping station, and sewer system from Sanaa to Ibb.