Hepatitis E outbreak in capital

Health officials in the Central African Republic have reported an outbreak of hepatitis E in three neighbourhoods of the capital, Bangui, state-owned Radio Centrafrique reported on Thursday. It said a joint team of the Ministry of Health and Medecins Sans Frontieres detected cases of the disease in the neigbourhoods of Gobongo, Kokoro-Boeing and Nguito. "The cases of hepatitis E are few, our team detected about 10 cases," Dr Abel Namssenmo, the director of preventive medicine and fight against disease at the Ministry of Health and Population, told IRIN on Friday. He added that the joint medical team was monitoring the outbreak. In a communiqué read over the radio the ministry urged the public to use only safe drinking water and to disinfect wells. In Bangui, hawkers sell water in plastic sachets; a practice that health authorities have warned is unsafe. Symptoms of the disease are yellowish eyes, tiredness and stomachaches. The UN World Health Organization (WHO) says Hepatitis E is a waterborne disease transmitted from person-to-person via the faecal-oral route. Contaminated water or food supplies have been implicated in major outbreaks, it says. People who have never contracted hepatitis are at risk of infection, WHO says, and the disease finds fertile ground in areas of poor sanitation. Hepatitis E is a mild to moderate disease in severity with a mortality rate of 0.4-4.0 percent, WHO says, "except in pregnancy, where the mortality rate is progressively higher in each succeeding trimester and may reach 20 percent".