Country distributing hundreds of thousands of oral vaccines as winter closes in

In a freezing classroom in Arsal, an isolated Lebanese town perched 1,500 metres above sea level near the Syrian border, one by one children line up for their cholera vaccine — taken orally, a quick gulp down the throat.

The teacher marks their hands with a pen, and now the jacket-clad children have an extra layer of protection against Lebanon’s first cholera outbreak in three decades.

Arsal, a largely Sunni Muslim town in the north-eastern reaches of the Baalbek-Hermel governorate, is one area of Lebanon that has been a focal point of the cholera spread — and efforts to fight the disease.

A poor, overcrowded town where informal settlements sit alongside houses, it’s the perfect place for the disease to take hold.