Meningitis death toll still rising

The meningitis death toll has continued to rise in Burkina Faso despite assurances last week by health authorities that the epidemic was regressing. The Health Ministry announced on Wednesday that deaths had risen to 1,379, out of 9623 cases. Last week the death toll had passed the 1,000 mark for the first time this year. “Our main problem is that we do not have enough doses of vaccines to have everybody vaccinated in the districts at the same time,” the secretary-general of the Health Ministry, Mathias Some, told IRIN on Wednesday. He said the shortage had persisted even though one million doses of the meningitis vaccine, provided by the World Health Organisation, had arrived in Burkina Faso last week. Burkina Faso’s authorities have already issued over 2.5 million doses, but are now facing bitter criticism from people who think the government failed to take adequate preventive measures. Twenty-six of the country’s 53 districts are affected by the epidemic, which broke out in early January. In 1996, a similar outbreak killed over 4,300 people out of the 42,967 who were infected. Meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain and spinal cord, surfaces annually during the dry season in the arid belt just south of the Sahara - from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east. Countries that have been hard hit this year include Niger, Benin, Chad and Ethiopia.