Cholera epidemic spreads nationwide after Touba pilgrimage

A cholera epidemic in central Senegal has spread nationwide after more than a million pilgrims visited the Muslim shrine of Touba last week and the number of new cases and recorded deaths has soared, a senior Health Ministry official said on Tuesday. "During the week from 28 March to 3 April nearly 3,400 new cases of cholera and 54 deaths were registered in the different healthcare districts throughout Senegal," Pape Coumba Faye, the Director of Preventive Medicine at the Health Ministry, told IRIN. Before last week's annual pilgrimage to Touba, a dusty town 200 km east of the capital Dakar, just over 2,000 cases of cholera and eight deaths had been registered in the Touba area since the beginning of this year. But more than a million Muslim pilgrims descended on the shrine of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, the founder of the Mouride Brotherhood, for the annual pilgrimage, which reached its climax on 29 to 30 March, and many of them appear to have picked up the highly infectious water-borne disease and taken it home with them. The number of new cases soared as people began to gather in Touba where fire engines provided extra water for huge crowds of people sleeping out in the open. According to government statistics 1,800 people caught cholera in Senegal between 21 and 27 March and 18 died from it. Last week, as the pilgrims trekked home, the number of new cases doubled. "Cases of cholera have been recorded throughout the country, mainly in Djourbel (the region in which Touba is situated), Dakar, Thies and to a lesser degree Louga," Faye told IRIN. Isolated cases had also been reported in other areas of the country, he added. The annual pilgrimage to Touba is also thought to have infected Gambia, where three people are being treated for cholera at the main hospital in the capital Banjul. However Faye said the number of new cases reported in Senegal had gone down over the past 48 hours and the epidemic was probably past its peak. "We have reinforced surveillance and have made available more medicines and hygiene products, warning messages have been broadcast on radio and television and we have got community organisations involved in taking the awareness campaign to people right on their own doorstep," he said. In Dakar, which suffered an unconnected cholera outbreak between October and December last year, about 30 cholera patients per day were being admitted to the city's university teaching hospital, according to local press.