The IFRC, which launched an emergency appeal for $1.14 million earlier this month, said the number of cholera cases was continuing to rise and that the number of fatal cases now topped 200.
The water-born bacteria is a regular blight in West Africa where toilet facilities are poor and whose urban slums face flooding every year with the rainy season. Neighbouring Guinea has also seen around 100 deaths so far this year.
Early rains together with increasing overcrowding in cities such as the Sierra Leonian capital Freetown have pushed the number of reported cases close to 12,000 this year, well past the previous record of 10,000 in 1994. "The disease has the potential to cause a serious humanitarian crisis," Amanda McClelland, IFRC Emergency Health Coordinator, said in a statement. "It is an urgent to step up our efforts as the situation is deteriorating quickly ... We need more funds to deliver the most effective response."
Money spent on tackling the roots of the outbreak so far has been spent on health promotion activities and on helping affected families prepare oral rehydration solutions and build suitable toilets. But the IFRC said the level of aid coverage was still "very low".
It said 217 deaths and 11,992 cases had been reported across 10 districts of the country, half of them among the one-million-strong population of Freetown.
While cholera is generally not fatal, it can kill in just a few hours when diarrhoea and vomiting cause dehydration, especially among the elderly. A cholera outbreak in Haiti that followed its 2010 earthquake killed more than 7,000 people. The death toll in Sierra Leone is likely to rise further in coming weeks towards the late-September peak of the rainy season. The outbreak is accelerating in Guinea, where around 50 have died of cholera since the start of July.
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