Another person has died as a result of the typhoid outbreak in Delmas in Mpumalanga, government officials said on Wednesday.
A 33-year-old woman died at Witbank hospital on Tuesday after developing complications from typhoid fever and multiple organ failure.
Two people have so far died and 51 cases of typhoid have been confirmed. The number of the people presenting symptoms of typhoid has risen from 309 on Tuesday to 408 by 1pm on Wednesday.
”The figure is expected to rise in the next three to six weeks because of the incubation period.
”The people coming forward may have been infected two to three weeks ago and [are] presenting the symptoms now because of the incubation period,” the departments of health, water affairs and forestry, local government, agriculture and the municipality said in a joint statement.
Health facilities are also seeing up to 400 more cases of diarrhoea a day. The number of cases of diarrhoea had risen from 1 826 on Tuesday to 2 338 by 1pm on Wednesday.
The deputy regional director of water affairs for Mpumalanga, Fanyana Mtambo, said some tests on the Delmas water system for the presence of the bacteria that cause typhoid were negative.
The tests from the two samples were, however, done after the water was chlorinated, he said.
Samples have since been taken from unchlorinated water and will be tested for the bacteria Salmonella typhi. The results are expected on Thursday.
Sampling done on levels of E coli and chlorine levels at different points in the system have revealed an abnormal E coli count in a number of wells and water points in town.
Mtambo said this means there is human excrement in the water.
Salmonella typhi only lives in humans. Persons with typhoid fever carry the bacteria in their bloodstream and intestinal tract.
Ways the fever can be contracted include sewage contaminated with the bacteria getting into water used for drinking or rinsing food.
Meanwhile, the government departments said the increased availability of ambulances deployed to ferry patients to health facilities, as well as education programmes on typhoid, have led to the increasing reports of the symptoms and diarrhoea.
More people are coming forward for treatment.
All health facilities in the town are operating 24 hours. Eight more nurses and one doctor were deployed to the area on Tuesday and Wednesday. Another 16 nurses from Gauteng were expected to arrive in Delmas on Wednesday.
An isolation ward with 70 beds has been opened at Witbank hospital, and a ward with 30 beds has been opened at Middelburg hospital.
The departments said Gauteng has offered 30 beds at Sizwe hospital.
Twenty-four water tanks and numerous donations of bottled water by Rand Water have been distributed to stop people the area from drinking pipe water.
The departments warned parents to restrain their children from playing in pipe water or wading in the streams. — Sapa