Cholera cases multiply

Cholera cases have been reported in a total of six Southern African countries this week, raising concern that the water-borne disease was being spread by human contact through the region. South Africa, Swaziland, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe have all reported cases. But WHO Representative in South Africa, Dr Welile Shasha, cautioned that the outbreaks may be unrelated. “There has been a lot of cholera in the region that has been dormant,” he told IRIN on Tuesday. “As far as I can make out, because of the recent rains it has been activated, not that it’s spreading.” He added that the outbreak in South Africa - where it has reached epidemic proportions in KwaZulu-Natal - was “unusually large”, but for the rest of the region where cholera is endemic, the cases were “normal” for this time of year. In Mozambique, the government announced that 60 people had died of the disease in the past two weeks. Health Minister Aida Libombo said there had been about 2,300 cases of cholera as a result of recent floods, the BBC reported. African Eye News Service reported on Monday that 40 residents in the Malawian business capital Blantyre were admitted to hospital with severe diarrhoea at the weekend. Blantyre City Medical Services Director Lycester Bandawe said on Monday that recent flooding and growing sanitation problems in the country’s southern Chikwawa and Nsanje districts appeared to have caused the outbreak. According to Malawi’s National Statistical Office, two million of the country’s nine million residents have no access to proper sanitation or sewerage systems. AFP reported on Monday that cholera had also struck the Zambian copperbelt town of Kabwe, with 31 cases of the disease and one death recorded. Central Board of Health director in the Kabwe area, Lendy Kasanda, said however, he was confident the authorities had managed to contain the disease since it broke out a week ago. Zimbabwe’s official the ‘Herald’ newspaper said on Tuesday that an outbreak of cholera in the Beitbridge district on the South African border had claimed two lives. The district medical officer-in-charge of Beitbridge referral district hospital, Dr Modercai Mahondo, appealed to an emergency civil protection unit meeting for equipment to monitor the epidemic. In South Africa, WHO on Monday praised KwaZulu-Natal’s health department for the manner it was tackling the province’s cholera crisis which has claimed 60 lives so far. A WHO team is visiting the southeastern province to determine the extent of the disease and to give advice on how to fight it. According to WHO, the death rate of around 0.5 percent was low for a cholera epidemic. The health department said that as of Sunday, the total number of infections stood at 15,983, with more than 500 people still hospitalised. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Mpumalanga, the health department on Monday confirmed that the number of cholera cases had increased to 18. These infections mainly originated in the Elandshoek and KaNyamazane areas near Nelspruit. Shasha said that apart from poverty and the problems of sanitation in KwaZulu-Natal, the scale of the outbreak “could be attributable to the rains and population movements, accentuated by the Christmas season”.