Boy dies of yellow fever in rebel-held northwest

A 13-year old boy has died of yellow fever in a village near Odienne, a town in the rebel-held north of Cote d'Ivoire close to the frontier with Guinea, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Thursday. UNICEF doctor Emile Alfani told IRIN that the boy died in the village of Kadiasso, 12 km from Odienne and 800 km northwest of the commercial capital Abidjan, on 6 November, three days after becoming ill. A crisis committee which includes representatives of the Ministry of Health, the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Pasteur Institute, and ECHO, the aid arm of the European Union, has been formed to deal with the outbreak. Alfani said it was officially considered to be an epidemic even though no other cases have been reported. The UNICEF doctor said all the 1,600 inhabitants of Kadiasso and three neighbouring village had been vaccinated against yellow fever, which produces a high fever, headaches and internal bleeding and a further 10,000 more doses of vaccine were sent to the area on Monday. An official at the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Belgium health centre in the northern town of Korhogo, told IRIN that MSF health workers had detected the case in Kasiaso and had been conducting a vaccination campaign in the area since then. All medical staff fled the Odienne area when civil war broke out in Cote d'Ivoire in September last year and official records show that no yellow fever vaccination campaign had been carried out there since 1999. Alfani said the crisis committee was investigating whether the outbreak is linked to another 500 km away in Gaoua in the south of Burkina Faso.