Dangers persist for nearly a million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, warned the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Dr. Richard Brennan, director of emergency operations at the WHO, issued the warning in Geneva on Wednesday, citing the risks of diseases, natural hazards and a serious funding shortage.
"We're not out of the woods yet," he told reporters.
The majority of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh live in "overcrowded…unsanitary camps," according to the United Nations.
"We are looking down the barrel of the monsoon season with the inherent risk of flooding, landslides, as well as the cyclone season," he said.
The refugee crisis started at the end of August last year when more than 670,000 people fled a military clampdown in Myanmar's Rakhine state, seeking shelter in the neighbouring Bangladesh.
There are now nearly 900,000 displaced individuals living in a dozen camps in and around the border town of Cox's Bazar, and WHO's Dr. Brennan said it was a "major achievement" that the mortality rates had remained low.
The cholera vaccination campaign is a vital follow-up to an earlier inoculation drive in October and November last year.
The disease causes acute watery diarrhea, which can be fatal if left untreated.
Despite the threat, however, cholera is "only one health concern among a number of priorities", the WHO official said, stressing the need for focusing on water and sanitation facilities as the most effective guarantee against other water-borne diseases.
The senior WHO official also cited serious funding shortages, which risked undermining efforts to protect already-vulnerable Rohingya communities who had fled Myanmar with "nothing, and suffered a litany of reported human rights abuses".
Some $950 million is required to help the refugees, Dr. Brennan estimated, but only around 16 per cent of this amount has been provided.
Resources are even scarcer when it comes to healthcare, with only 6.3 per cent of funding needs being met.
As refugees continue to arrive in Bangladesh from Myanmar, the WHO official repeated the core UN demand that any future return of mainly-Muslim Rohingya communities would have to be "safe, voluntary and dignified".
Concerns remain about the poor state of health services in Myanmar's Rakhine state, where the UN health agency has limited access and provides disease surveillance, training, mobile clinics and medical supplies.
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