Cholera kills two in northern IDP camp

At least two people have died following an outbreak of cholera at a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Uganda’s Gulu district, UN officials in the region told IRIN on Monday. "Two people died in the community and up to yesterday [Sunday] 25 cases have been recorded," said Vincent Oryem, a doctor working with the World Health Organisation (WHO). "A week ago, there were reports of severe diarrhoea and vomiting in the new [IDP] camp of Jengali," Oryem said. "We sent a team of medical people there, who took samples from victims, and two days later a cholera epidemic was confirmed," he added. Located about 16 km north of Gulu town, itself 380 km north of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, Jengali is a pilot IDP camp of about 1,600 huts. It has between 6,000 and 8,000 residents. Jengali was established to ease congestion in another camp, Pabbo, about 4 km away, which houses up to 67,000 IDPs. According to Andrew Timpson of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gulu, the squalid conditions in Pabbo were quickly becoming a logistical and health nightmare. Timpson told IRIN that many people were still commuting between Pabbo and Jengali, as food relief was yet to reach the latter. According to Oryem, WHO suspected that the epidemic at Jengali could have been trigged by contaminated water sources, but samples from all water sources at the camp had been tested and found to be free of contamination. "We concluded that some residents carried cholera strains from Pabbo following the last epidemic there last October," the doctor said, referring to a 2004 outbreak in Pabbo that killed at least two people and sent up to 50 others in hospital. Several NGOs in the area were treating those infected, he added, and an initiative to emphasise personal and community hygiene was under way. According to Gulu district officials, health-education programmes have also started on local FM radio stations. In addition to health problems, Pabbo has also been hit by several fires over the years, which destroyed the homes of several thousand IDPs. After the fires, the Ugandan government announced a move to decongest the camp by moving some IDPs from Pabbo to newer, more spacious settlements such as Jengali. Government statistics put the number of IDPs in Uganda at an estimated 1.4 million, most of whom were displaced by the war in the north between government forces and rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army. Cattle raids in the east of the country have also led to displacement.