Meningitis eases after more than 1,000 die

An outbreak of meningitis in Burkina Faso that has killed over 1,000 people since October, has shown signs of declining, health officials told IRIN on Thursday. The number of new cases recorded has declined from 441 a week to 291, they said. No health district was in an epidemic situation - where at least 10 cases are reported per 100,000 inhabitants. However five districts out of 53 in the landlocked West African country remained "on alert" with five to eight cases reported per 100,000 inhabitants. Altogether, 7,846 cases have been reported since October last year and 1,184 victims of the disease, which causes an inflamation of the brain, have died. Health Minister Alain Yoda said two million doses of vaccines obtained through the World Health Organisation (WHO) to combat the W135 and the A, C strains of meningitis had helped contain the epidemic. The government has only vaccinated people in the worst affected areas because it does not have enough doses to cover the whole country. WHO reported on Wednesday that 32 of Burkina Faso's 53 districts had been affected by meningitis since January. Yoda however warned that the disease was a permanent problem in Burkina Faso, which lies on the African meningitis belt that stretches across the dry savannah region from Senegal in the West to Ethiopia in the east. This suffers outbreaks of the disease every year during the dry season. "We can limit the number of deaths due to meningitis which exists permanently in Burkina Faso, but we cannot do away with cases of meningitis forever," Yoda said in an interview. Meningitis is a disease whose symptoms include fever, nausea and headache. It can progress rapidly to cause serious brain damage, deafness, coma and death. Even with treatment, up to 20 percent of those infected die. The A and C strains existed in Burkina Faso before last year, when a more virulent W135 strain was identified.