How Many People Die From Cholera Every Year?

Picture a camp on the edge of a town in Sudan, a few months into a war. Thousands of families have arrived with whatever they could carry. There is one water point for every few hundred people, the latrines overflowed weeks ago, and the rainy season has just begun. One morning a man in his thirties, strong enough the day before to dig a shelter for his family, collapses with violent, watery diarrhoea. By the afternoon his eyes are sunken, his skin has lost its stretch, and he can barely speak.

If someone reaches him with oral rehydration salts, or better still an intravenous drip, he will very probably be back on his feet within days. If nobody does, he could be dead before nightfall. Cholera is one of the fastest killers known to medicine, and one of the easiest to treat.

That contrast is the whole story of cholera in the 21st century. We have understood how it spreads since the 1850s. We have cheap, simple treatment and working vaccines. And yet in 2025, more cholera deaths were reported to the World Health Organization than in any year since 1999.

The headline number

There are two ways to count cholera deaths, and they give very different answers.

Reported deaths are the ones countries officially notify to WHO. In 2025, 47 countries reported 451,499 cases and 7,870 deaths. That was fewer cases than 2024 but around 30% more deaths, and the highest annual death toll reported to WHO in more than a quarter of a century.

Estimated deaths try to account for everything that is never reported. WHO's fact sheet cites research estimating 1.3 to 4 million cases and 21,000 to 143,000 deaths every year. Many countries do not report cholera at all, some report it only as "acute watery diarrhoea", and many deaths happen at home without any test.

Every one of those deaths is part of the roughly 170,000 deaths a day from all causes that you can watch on our live death counter.

Time period	Reported deaths (2025)	Lower estimate (21,000/yr)	Upper estimate (143,000/yr)
Per year	7,870	21,000	143,000
Per month	656	1,750	11,900
Per week	151	404	2,750
Per day	22	58	392
Per hour	0.9	2.4	16
Per minute	0.015	0.04	0.27

The honest answer to "how many people die from cholera every year?" is therefore: at least 7,870 that we know about, and very probably tens of thousands more.

Cholera is getting worse, not better

For a disease that rich countries banished more than a century ago, cholera has made a grim comeback. Since around 2021, WHO has described a global "upsurge", with more countries reporting outbreaks, bigger outbreaks, and more deaths.

Year	Countries reporting	Reported cases	Reported deaths
2021	35	about 223,000	about 4,200
2022	44	about 473,000	about 2,350
2023	45	more than 535,000	about 4,000
2024	60	more than 560,000	more than 6,000
2025	47	451,499	7,870

The most worrying line is the last column. Reported deaths have roughly doubled in two years, even though case numbers in 2025 actually fell. That points to outbreaks happening in places where people cannot reach treatment in time, which is exactly what you see in war zones.

WHO currently rates the global risk from cholera as very high.

Where cholera kills

Cholera follows poverty, conflict and unsafe water. In 2025, just seven countries accounted for around 90% of all reported cases and deaths: Angola, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen.

Country	Why cholera has hit hard
Sudan	Civil war, mass displacement, collapsed water and health systems
South Sudan	Flooding, displacement, refugees arriving from Sudan
Democratic Republic of the Congo	Long-running conflict in the east, crowded camps
Angola	Large urban outbreak in 2025
Nigeria	Seasonal outbreaks, flooding, insecurity in the north
Yemen	Years of war; home of the largest cholera outbreak in modern records
Bangladesh	Endemic cholera, dense populations, refugee camps

The WHO African Region bore the heaviest burden in 2025, with cases up 34% and deaths up 58% on the year before. You can see the wider picture of mortality across the continent on our Africa region page.

Cholera is also a reminder of how war kills long after the shooting. Damaged pipes, destroyed clinics and crowded camps can kill more people than the fighting itself, which we explore in how many people die in wars every year.

Why cholera is so deadly, and so treatable

Cholera is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which people swallow in contaminated water or food. Most people who are infected never get sick at all, though they can still shed the bacteria for one to ten days and pass it on. But in a minority, the bacteria release a toxin that makes the gut pour out water.

Feature	Cholera
Cause	Vibrio cholerae bacteria
How it spreads	Water or food contaminated with faeces
Time from infection to symptoms	12 hours to 5 days
Most infected people	Have no symptoms, but can spread it
Severe cases	Profuse watery diarrhoea, can kill within hours
Main treatment	Oral rehydration salts; IV fluids for severe cases
Target death rate in treatment centres	under 1%

The treatment sounds almost too simple. Most patients recover with oral rehydration salts, a cheap mix of sugar and salts in clean water. Severe cases need intravenous fluids and sometimes antibiotics. With prompt care, WHO aims to keep the death rate among treated patients below 1%.

In 2025 the global case fatality rate among patients treated in health facilities stayed under that 1% threshold, but 12 countries exceeded it, and more than one in five reported deaths happened outside health facilities altogether. Across all reported cases, 7,870 deaths from 451,499 cases works out to roughly 1.7%. Those are the people who never reached a drip in time.

Cholera is one cause within the much bigger toll of diarrhoeal disease, which kills over a million people a year. We cover that in how many people die from diarrhoea every day and on our diarrhoeal diseases page.

The vaccine shortage

There are safe, effective oral cholera vaccines. The problem has been making enough of them.

Since October 2022, global supplies have been so short that outbreak responses have used a single dose instead of the standard two, a compromise endorsed by WHO's vaccine advisers to stretch supplies. For more than three years, preventive vaccination campaigns were suspended altogether, so every available dose could go to emergency outbreak response.

Vaccine milestone	Detail
October 2022	Switch to one-dose campaigns because of global shortage
2022 production	about 30 million doses a year
2025 production	about 80 million doses a year
2025	71 million doses approved for affected countries, including 20 million for prevention
February 2026	20 million doses allocated for preventive campaigns
2026	Preventive vaccination resumes after more than three years

Production has more than doubled, which is genuine good news. But vaccines are only a stopgap. A single dose gives shorter protection, and no vaccine fixes a camp without clean water.

The real cure: clean water and sanitation

Cholera disappeared from Britain, Western Europe and North America not because of medicine, but because of pipes. The turning point is a famous story: in 1854, the physician John Snow traced a deadly cholera outbreak in Soho, London, to a single contaminated water pump on Broad Street. His work helped prove that cholera spread through water, and the great sewer and water projects that followed made it vanish from British cities.

Cholera then and now	Detail
1817 onwards	Seven cholera pandemics have swept the world
1854	John Snow links London cholera to the Broad Street pump
1961 to today	The seventh pandemic, caused by the El Tor strain, is still going
2010 to 2019	Haiti outbreak after the earthquake: hundreds of thousands of cases, nearly 10,000 deaths
2016 onwards	Yemen: the largest outbreak in modern records, millions of suspected cases

Today, according to WHO and UNICEF, around 2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, and unsafe water and poor sanitation kill an estimated 1.4 million people a year through cholera and other water-related diseases. That is the soil cholera grows in, and it is why our water-related diseases page tracks it alongside typhoid, dysentery and others.

The Global Task Force on Cholera Control's roadmap aims to cut cholera deaths by 90% and eliminate the disease in up to 20 countries by 2030. The recent rise in deaths shows how far off track the world is.

Cholera in the UK and the US

For most readers in Britain and America, cholera is history. Both countries see only a small number of cases a year, almost all in travellers returning from countries where it is common, and deaths are extremely rare. Good water treatment means it cannot spread the way it did in Victorian London. If you are travelling to an area with an active outbreak, travel health services can advise on the cholera vaccine and on safe food and water.

Who cholera kills most

Cholera can kill a healthy adult, which is part of what makes it so frightening. But some groups are at far higher risk:

Group	Why
Young children	Dehydrate fastest; malnutrition makes it worse
Older adults	Less physical reserve, other illnesses
People in camps and conflict zones	Unsafe water, crowding, no clinics
People already malnourished	Higher risk of severe disease and death

This is why cholera often appears alongside the other killers of crisis zones: hunger, child mortality and diarrhoeal disease in children under five. To see how it compares with other preventable infections such as rabies, read how many people die from rabies every year, or compare causes side by side with our compare causes tool.

While you were reading

This article takes about eleven minutes to read. In that time, roughly 1,300 people died around the world from all causes. Going by WHO's estimate of the true cholera toll, somewhere between about one and four of them died from cholera, very possibly in a camp or a village with no clean water and no drip. You can watch the global total rising on our live death counter, or see today's running total.

Sources: World Health Organization, Cholera fact sheet (September 2026) and "WHO reports latest global trends in cholera, meningitis and plague" (29 September 2026); WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record, global cholera situation reports for 2021 to 2024; WHO multi-country cholera outbreak external situation reports; Global Task Force on Cholera Control, Ending Cholera roadmap to 2030; WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. Reported figures are what countries notify to WHO and substantially understate the true burden. This article is for general information and is not medical advice.