No region spared as cholera cases top 15,000

A cholera epidemic in Guinea-Bissau is showing no sign of fading with all regions of the impoverished country now affected and more than 4,000 new cases of the disease reported so far this month, officials said. In a bulletin issued late Tuesday, the health ministry said 15,573 cases of cholera had now been recorded, up from 11,192 at the beginning of the month. Some 270 people have died since the epidemic first struck the former Portuguese colony in mid-June. "The problem in Guinea-Bissau is that it's an epidemic that is moving out from the towns and spreading to rural areas," said Claire-Lise Chaignat, the leading cholera expert at the UN World Health Organisation. And heavy rains, which are not due to subside until next month, make reaching those areas tricky. "Getting people, sanitation and medicines out into rural areas is difficult, because rains make the roads impassable and so the cholera can continue attacking people," Michel Balima, the UN resident co-ordinator in Guinea-Bissau, told IRIN. Cholera, an acute intestinal infection caused by consuming contaminated food or water, can kill within 24 hours by inducing severe vomiting and diarrhoea. When the outbreak started three months ago, more than nine out of ten cases were to be found around the capital, Bissau -- a city of 300,000 built on low-lying land on the banks of a muddy river estuary -- and the nearby coastal region of Biombo to the west. Now these urban areas account for around seven out of ten cases, Chaignat said. "Normally cholera springs up in pockets but in Guinea-Bissau now, all of the nine regions are affected," she added. "What's worrying is that one percent of the whole population is affected." Authorities in Guinea-Bissau, a country of just 1.3 million, rely on assistance from the international community just to pay state salaries every month. They have been overwhelmed by the scale of the cholera outbreak, even though a simple mix of water, sugar and salts is enough to save many sufferers. A government document obtained by IRIN on Wednesday showed that Guinea-Bissau authorities are seeking 1.2 million euros of aid to deal with the crisis over the next three to six months to supply people with medicine and improve sanitation. Experts say that the country's poor infrastructure, stunted by a 1998-1999 civil war and years of subsequent instability, means there will be no quick fix. "Infrastructure is not something that can be improved overnight," Chaignat of the WHO said. Last week UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called on the international community to continue supporting Guinea-Bissau, even though elections, billed as the final chapter in the country's transition back to democracy, were over. "Guinea-Bissau... cannot meet its multiple short-term and long-term political and economic challenges without international assistance," Annan wrote in a report. He said the international community needed to fund a US $1.5 million package of quick-impact projects even before a key donor meeting in November "to show the population of Guinea-Bissau quick and visible dividends of the present peacebuilding efforts."