AMINU ABUBAKAR, Kano | Tuesday
LYING on a stretcher covered in his own excrement, a young man pleaded on Monday for help from exhausted hospital workers and volunteers, overwhelmed by a cholera outbreak here.
The young mechanical apprentice, surrounded by hundreds of other cholera sufferers in Kano’s Infectious Diseases Hospital (IDH), pleaded in vain.
There were too few staff and, despite some weekend medical supplies from Unicef, the World Health Organisation and the Nigerian government, there was too little help to go around, hospital staff said.
The two regular wards at the IDH, a specialist hospital set up in the Sabon Gari district of northern Nigeria’s largest city, overflowed weeks ago.
To cope with more than 2 500 patients taken in over the past few weeks alone, five tents have been set up in the hospital grounds while more recent arrivals are lined up on mats and stretchers with little or no shelter from the burning midday sun.
“We are currently getting about 120-130 patients a day, down a little from 160-180 a day last week but still more than we can cope with,” the hospital’s chief medical doctor said.
“We have had some equipment, drips, rehydration bags and gloves, from the government and the aid agencies, but we need much more,” the doctor said.
To try to stop the infection spreading, anyone entering or leaving the hospital, is being sprayed with disinfectant, even the corpses removed for burial are being washed down with disinfectant.
Around the grounds of the hospital, volunteers with megaphones called out the names of patients whose relatives had come to visit.
“It is too dangerous to let too many people go in, so we call the patients out to an area where they can talk to their relatives through a fence, if they can move of course,” said one volunteer.
Hospital staff, speaking on condition of anonymity, estimate that well over 500 people have died since the start of the month in the IDH and another, children’s hospital. But staff are unwilling to speak on the record on the death toll.
Around 200 children have died at the Hafiya Bayero children’s hospital in the city in the past two weeks, officials said on Friday.
On Monday, access to the hospital was barred by security men refusing entrance to any non-staff.
Attempting to play down the seriousness of the outbreak, the state government, which has a long track record of covering up outbreaks of disease, insists that only 68 people have died and 1 000 people treated. The reality is different.
In the last five years, Kano, an ancient trading city of stone and mud-built houses, narrow walkways and back alleys, has suffered a series of epidemics linked to its poor sanitation, lack of hygiene education and the often polluted drinking water.
In 1996, thousands of people died in an outbreak of meningitis in Kano and earlier this year an outbreak of measles hit the city, killing many more.
“Partly, the problem is that people are just not educated about hygiene and partly about vaccinations for preventable diseases,” one health worker said.
“Another factor is the scarcity of clean drinking water.”
Often called a poor man’s disease, cholera is a waterborne viral disease characterised by diarrhoea, vomiting, muscle cramps and severe loss of body fluids, which can lead to death. – AFP