Nearly 200 people catch cholera in Dakar

Nearly 200 cases of cholera have been confirmed in the Senegalese capital Dakar this month, but so far only two people have died, government doctors said on Friday. Doctor Pape Salif Sow, the head of the infectious diseases department at Fann university teaching hospital, said 199 cholera cases had been reported since 11 October. The two fatalities were both people who were in an advanced stage of the illness when they were brought to hospital in the early days of the outbreak, he told IRIN. “The two patients came very late, already dying, and we did not even have time to put them on a drip,” he said. Sow expressed relief that the water-borne disease, which causes accute diarrhoea and vomiting, had so far been largely contained within Dakar, a city of 2.5 million people. He said only two cases had so far been detected elsewhere. Both were recorded in the small town of Bambey, 200 km east of the capital. According to Dr Bassirou Johnson, an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health, prompt action by the public health authorities and a public awareness campaign conducted through the media were bearing fruit. People were now going to hospital as soon as they felt the first symptoms of cholera coming on, he said. This is the first cholera outbreak to hit Dakar for eight years. Some officials have suggested the disease may have spread from neighbouring Guinea, which has suffered a major outbreak of the disease in recent months. This is now subsiding. The Senegalese government has urged people to wash their hands with soap and avoid eating food bought at stalls on the street. Johnson said public health officials were touring Dakar to confiscate potentially unsafe drinking water being sold by street vendors in plastic bags. On Thursday President Abdoulaye Wade washed his hands in the VIP room of Dakar airport in front of television cameras and urged all Senegalese to respect the hygene measures as he arrived back from a trip to France and South Africa. “We insist that people go to hospital as soon as they have diarrhoea and vomit, because they can be cured within 24 hours,” Sow said. Cholera epidemics are normally caused by poor sanitation and polluted drinking water. They are a perennial hazard during the rainy season in much of West Africa as latrines overflow and wells become polluted.