OWN CORRESPONDENTS, Johannesburg | Thursday
WORLD Health Organisation (WHO) experts will visit South Africa this week to help contain a cholera epidemic that has already claimed 53 lives in KwaZulu-Natal and threatens to spill over into neighbouring provinces.
The move comes a day after health authorities in Mpumalanga confirmed that a cholera case at Machadodorp has been linked to the epidemic in KwaZulu-Natal, which has infected more than 13_000 people since mid-August.
A further three cases of the disease seemed to have been imported from Mozambique, said Dr Kelvin Billinghurst of the Mpumalanga communicable disease control unit, who confirmed that a man from Machadodorp who contracted the disease had visited the Empangeni area over the holiday period.
The WHO experts will review the causes of the cholera outbreak and help national and provincial health authorities design a programme to contain the disease, said WHO Southern African representative Welile Shasha.
Welile said the spread of cholera had been attributed to heavy rains and high population movement over the holiday season.
WHO credits the effectiveness of the KwaZulu-Natal health system for the low fatality rate – less than half a percent of all reported cases.
Billinghurst said while an early warning system had helped detect the outbreak in its initial stage “only one case was needed to create a problem”.
Cholera has been endemic in the Mpumalanga province for some time. Earlier last year there had been a small outbreak in the Tonga region when 22 people contracted the disease after major flooding in Mozambique in February.
National Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang this week expressed concern that the disease might spread from KwaZulu-Natal to the rest of the country as thousands of holidaymakers and migrant workers left the province at the end of the festive season.
Tshabalala-Msimang, Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Ronnie Kasrils, provincial MECs and heads of departments met in Durban this week to discuss the KwaZulu-Natal crisis.
A multi-disciplinary task team was appointed to review measures to fight the disease.
Three provinces, including Gauteng, Mpumalanga and the Free State were placed on alert while response teams were established in all nine provinces in the event that the disease spread to the rest of the country. – AFP