Cholera epidemic kills 15 in capital

Some 15 people have died in a cholera outbreak in Malabo, the island capital of Equatorial Guinea, and nearly 1,000 more have fallen ill, officials at the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday. “We have a confirmed epidemic of cholera,” Dr Kalambay Kalula, the WHO representative in Equatorial Guinea, told IRIN by telephone. “The Pasteur Institute in Yaounde (Cameroon) has confirmed this afternoon that all the five samples sent to their laboratories for testing are indeed cholera,” he said. An outbreak of accute diarrhoea suspected to be cholera first appeared in Malabo, the capital of this oil-rich Central African state, two weeks ago. “Up to this morning, we have 15 deaths and 946 cases linked to the outbreak,” Kalula said. Cholera is a highly infectious water-borne illness that causes severe vomiting and diarrhoea. If leads to rapid dehydration. If left untreated can result in death within hours. The disease is frequently associated with poverty, poor sanitation and polluted drinking water. Although the oil bonanza has brought sudden wealth to the ruling elite that surrounds President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, diplomats and aid workers say that little of the oil money has been channeled into improving living standards for the rest of the country's 500,000 population. As a result Malabo suffers from chronic water shortages and power cuts. Severe diarrhoea outbreaks regularly occur at this time of year in Equatorial Guinea and Kalula cautioned that not all those who were presently ill were necessarily suffering from cholera. “It is the dry season here and the weather makes things very difficult. A recent water analysis in the capital found that all water wells had diarrhoea causing bacteria,” he said.

Equatorial Guinea is made up of an island, where the capital Malabo is located, and mainland territories

The source of the outbreak has yet to be determined, though doctors speculate that it could have been carried from Bata - the mainland part of Equatorial Guinea, 150 km southeast of Bioko island (formerly known as Fernando Po) where the capital is situated. “We had four confirmed cases of cholera in Bata last month,” said Dr Kalula. In Malabo itself, he said, “The outbreak is mostly in over populated areas with poor sanitation.” Cholera is commonly transmitted by drinking water or eating food contaminated with the cholera bacterium. In an epidemic, the source of the contamination is usually the faeces of an infected person. “The government, through the Ministry of Health, has taken strong measures at community level to treat cases in the community where possible and attend to severe cases in hospital,” Kalula said. "We are hoping that this campaign will, as in Bata, stop more cases being reported.” The WHO official said the mainly US oil companies that pump around 350,000 barrels of oil per day from Equatorial Guinea's offshore waters, were lending a hand providing tanker trucks to supply clean drinking water to the affected areas of Malabo. They had also supplied re-hydration formulas and other medicines for patients, he added. Equatorial Guinea is a former Spanish colony nestled between Cameroon and Gabon. But since oil production started in 1991, the country has become transformed from a remote and forgotten backwater into Africa's third largest oil exporter after Nigeria and Angola. The government has, so far, not commented on the latest cholera outbreak.