A cholera outbreak in war-ravaged Yemen could infect more than 300,000 people by the end of August, up from nearly 193,000 cases today, the United Nations said Friday.

"Probably at the end of August we will reach 300,000" cases, U.N. children's agency spokeswoman Meritxell Relano told reporters in Geneva during a conference call.

Since the outbreak was declared in April, an estimated 1,265 people have died, she said.

"The number of cases continue to increase," Relano said, adding that all of Yemen's 21 governorates have been affected.

She said that children had been hit hard by the outbreak, accounting for half of the registered cases to date.

But only a quarter of the people who have died so far were children, she said.

Cholera is a highly contagious bacterial infection spread through contaminated food or water.

Although the disease is easily treatable, doing so in conflict-torn Yemen has proved particularly difficult.

Two years of war between the Huthi rebels and government forces backed by a Saudi-led Arab military coalition have killed more than 8,000 people and wounded 45,000 others.

According to the U.N. human rights agency, civilians account for nearly 5,000 of the recorded deaths and more than 8,500 of the injuries.

The conflict has also devastated the country's infrastructure, leaving more than half of its medical facilities out of service.

Yemen is also on the brink of famine, with about 17 million people -- two-thirds of the population -- uncertain of where their next meal will come from, according to the U.N.'s World Food Program.

"This is the largest humanitarian crisis happening in the world at the moment," WFP spokeswoman Bettina Luescher told reporters.

She said the agency was scaling up its response and aimed to provide food aid to 6.8 million people across the country this month alone.

But more than half of those people will receive reduced rations because of a dire funding shortage, she warned. </s> Devastating conflicts, violence and persecution in places like Syria and South Sudan had left a record 65.6 million people uprooted from their homes by the end of 2016, the U.N. said Monday.

That number marks a jump of just 300,000 from the end of 2015, but is more than six million higher than at the end of 2014, according to a fresh report published by the U.N. refugee agency.

This is "the highest figure since we started recording these figures," UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi told reporters ahead of the report launch.

"By any measure, this is an unacceptable number, and it speaks louder than ever to the need for solidarity and common purpose in preventing and resolving crises," he said.

The figures released ahead of World Refugee Day showed that a full 10.3 million of the world's displaced people fled their homes last year alone, including 3.4 million who crossed international borders to become refugees.

"This equates to one person becoming displaced every three seconds -- less than the time it takes to read this sentence," UNHCR pointed out in a statement.

Most people who have been forced from their homes flee within their own country, and are defined as internally displaced people, or IDPs.

At the end of 2016, there were some 40.3 million IDPs in the world, down slightly from 40.8 million a year earlier, with Syria, Iraq and Colombia accounting for the greatest numbers.

Another 22.5 million people -- half of them children -- were registered as refugees last year, the UNHCR report showed, pointing out that this is "the highest level ever recorded."

Syria's six-year conflict alone has sent more than 5.5 million people seeking safety in other countries, including 825,000 last year alone, making it the world's biggest producer of refugees.

Along with the 6.3 million Syrians displaced inside the country, these numbers show that a nearly two thirds of all Syrians have been forced from their homes, the report said.

As the Syrian civil war rages on, desperately needed funding for humanitarian aid in the country has begun to dwindle, Grandi said, lamenting that very little of the billions promised at an international donor's conference in Brussels in April had so far materialized.

The Syrian conflict, which has killed more than 320,000 people, "is becoming a forgotten crisis," he warned.

The U.N. refugee chief meanwhile voiced most alarm over the rapidly deteriorating situation in South Sudan, which he said was currently the world's "fastest growing refugee crisis and displacement crisis."

South Sudan's civil war, which began in December 2013, has left tens of thousands dead and forced a total of 3.7 million people from their homes -- nearly a third of the population.

Overall, the refugee population from the world's youngest country swelled 85 percent last year to reach 1.4 million by the end of 2016, the UNHCR report showed.

And that number has ballooned by a further half million people since then, the agency said, stressing the most of the refugees had left since the "disastrous breakdown of peace efforts" last July.

Syria and South Sudan were far from the only countries where people were being uprooted en masse, with Monday's report also pointing to large-scale displacement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan, just to name a few.

And nearly 70 years after Palestinians first fled today's Israel, some 5.3 million Palestinians are currently living as refugees -- the highest level ever recorded, UNHCR said.

Monday's report also pointed out that, despite huge focus on Europe's migrant crisis, it is poorer countries that host most of the world's refugees.

A full 84 percent of refugees are living in low- and middle-income countries, UNHCR said, blaming this "huge imbalance" on "the continuing lack of consensus internationally when it comes to refugee hosting and the proximity of many poor countries to regions of conflict." </s> The number of people displaced from their homes across the world due to war and persecution climbed slightly to a record 65.6 million last year, with the escalating conflict in South Sudan largely accounting for the rise, the United Nations refugee agency said Monday.

The figure that includes refugees, asylum seekers and people uprooted inside their own countries was some 300,000 higher at the end of last year than at the end of 2015, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said.

Of the total, some 10.3 million people were newly displaced in 2016, around two-thirds fleeing within their own countries, according to an annual report by the group. The total refugee population — people who fled their home countries — was about 22.5 million people, and nearly half of those were children.

Syria's six-year civil war remained the largest single cause of displacement, with 12 million people — around two-thirds of the population — either uprooted within the country or fleeing abroad, the group said.

They were followed by some 7.7 million Colombians, 4.7 million Afghans, 4.2 million Iraqis and 3.3 million South Sudanese.
More than 400,000 people displaced by the conflict are affected by disease outbreaks and psychological trauma.