Diphtheria cases are rapidly increasing across Somalia, officials and humanitarians warn, with children accounting for more than 97% of the cases.
Diphtheria, a highly contagious and deadly bacterial disease that mainly affects children, is preventable by a vaccine. While Somalia has improved vaccination rates in recent years, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) blames the uptick in cases on persisting immunisation gaps.
Abdulrazaq Yusuf Ahmed, the director of Demartino public hospital in the capital, Mogadishu, said: “The number of recorded cases of children sick with diphtheria has increased across the regions in the whole country. We have received about 49 patients in the whole of 2024 but this year, 2025, we have received 497 diphtheria cases during the last four months alone.”
Deaths had risen from 13 to 42, according to a report by Ahmed’s hospital this month. The report described the resurgence of diphtheria as “one of the most urgent and dangerous threats to public health”.
Earlier this month, the health ministry said it had recorded 1,616 cases and 87 deaths from the disease so far this year.
MSF’s Somalia medical coordinator, Frida Athanassiadis, said: “We are seeing a rapid increase in diphtheria among children under 15 in central Somalia,” adding that they accounted for roughly 97% of cases. “Low vaccination coverage, vaccine hesitancy and poor living conditions are driving the spread.”
Athanassiadis said that in some medical centres the basic resources were “insufficient to cope with rising caseloads”.
MSF said while teams initially had a small emergency stock of the antitoxin, it had now been exhausted, with the health ministry and the World Health Organization helping to distribute the “limited available stock based on needs”.
In July, Save the Children warned that since April cases of measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, cholera and severe respiratory infections in Somalia had doubled from roughly 22,600 to more than 46,000. About 60% of the cases were children under five, it said.
“The sharp rise in vaccine-preventable diseases is linked to the recent aid cuts, which have impacted the health system’s capacity to deliver essential services, including routine immunisation, and to treat and run catch-up campaigns to increase the immunity necessary to halt the outbreak,” the NGO said.
In Mogadishu, one resident, Abdiwahid Ali, said: “Many children in my neighbourhood are sick, some of them hospitalised.”
Anab Hassan, a grocer, said people were concerned about the outbreak. “A friend of mine lost a five-year-old daughter who was diagnosed with diphtheria, and several others told me their children are sick and coughing,” she said. “We hear about children getting sick every day.”
