Cholera has infected almost 6 000 south Sudanese and killed at least 44 this year, with more than half dying within the past four weeks, officials from the South Sudanese Health Ministry said on Wednesday.
”From previous experience it always starts [in the south] and goes north,” South Sudan’s director for preventable medicine John Rumunu said. The epidemic has now reached Bor town, in the centre of South Sudan, he said.
A 2005 peace deal ended more than two decades of north-south civil war and established a semi-autonomous southern government, but the conflict left the region’s health infrastructure desperately undeveloped.
About 700 people died from the waterborne disease in 2006 and about 25 000 were affected. Cholera causes vomiting and acute diarrhoea and can rapidly lead to death from dehydration if not treated.
This year outbreaks have occurred in several southern towns, Rumunu said, including the southern capital, Juba, where cases in nearby army barracks first raised the alarm in May.
Government authorities and United Nations agencies have been trying to force private water truckers to chlorinate their water before selling it to Juba households, most of which do not have running water.
Sahr Kemoh, a water and sanitation expert with the United Nations Children’s Fund, said in 2007 an estimated 9 800 cases were recorded in total, but said year’s rains were not over.
Sudan’s north-south conflict killed two million people. Fought over religious, ethnic and ideological differences, it was fuelled by the discovery of large oil reserves. It is separate from the Darfur conflict. — Reuters