WHO calls this El Nino a public health threat: cholera, dengue and a late monsoon

The World Health Organization has called the current El Niño a significant public health threat and a risk multiplier, as the World Meteorological Organization tracks what it describes as the strongest El Niño in 40 years of records, with effects running into 2027.

Teresa Zakaria, the WHO's unit head for risk reduction, said countries should act now to mitigate the impacts and avoid loss of life and suffering.

The diseases named

The WHO singled out four:

• Cholera, where heavy rainfall and flooding contaminate drinking water
• Malaria
• Dengue
• Chikungunya

The last three are mosquito-borne. Warmer, wetter conditions lengthen the breeding season and widen the area where the mosquito survives.

The regions named

Central America, Indonesia, southern Africa (drought) and parts of Asia, where the warning is delayed monsoons.

That last phrase is the one that matters here. Pakistan's water year and its crop calendar are built around the monsoon arriving roughly on time. A late or weak monsoon squeezes Kharif irrigation and pushes farmers onto tubewells, which costs diesel and electricity at exactly the point in the year when nobody has spare cash.

What this already looks like in Pakistan

Karachi recorded 41 degrees on Monday, its hottest September day in ten years. That is a single day and not by itself proof of anything, but it is the kind of reading that becomes more common in an El Niño year, and it lands in the month when dengue season normally peaks in Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi.

What actually reduces your risk

The health advice for a dengue-and-cholera year is dull and it works.

1. Standing water. Empty coolers, plant saucers, roof tanks and construction pits weekly. Aedes mosquitoes breed in clean standing water, not drains.
2. Screens and repellent at dawn and dusk, which is when Aedes bites.
3. Drinking water. Boil or filter if the supply is interrupted or the line has been dug up nearby. Cholera risk rises when mains pressure drops and sewage gets in.
4. Fever that lasts more than two days with body aches gets a blood test, not a guess. Dengue is confirmed by a lab, and the dangerous phase is when the fever falls.

The cost side

A hotter, longer summer means more hours of air conditioning and a bigger bill under the slab system, where crossing a unit threshold reprices your whole consumption. Work out what a unit of cooling costs you on our AC running cost calculator, and check the bill itself against the current tariff on the electricity bill calculator.