Luanda

A cholera epidemic in war-devastated Angola has claimed 1 246 lives with more than 35 000 people ill with the disease, the World Health Organisation announced on Tuesday. Cholera, a highly infectious waterborne disease that causes severe diarrhoea, is present in large swathes of Angola.

More than 1 000 people have died from a cholera outbreak in Angola over the past 11 weeks, with more than 25 000 others ill from the disease, according to the regional office of the World Health Organisation. The outbreak was detected in the Luanda district of Boa Vista on February 13 and the capital has been the hardest hit by the epidemic with 13 379 cases registered, including 197 deaths.

The death toll after a deadly outbreak of cholera in war-devasted Angola has climbed to 900, a medical humanitarian organisation said on Thursday, reporting one death every hour this week. The last toll reported by the United Nations’s World Health Organisation stood at 570 just over a week ago.

Cholera has claimed more than 570 lives over the past two months in the war-devastated Southern African nation of Angola, where police on Wednesday vowed to join the fight against the epidemic. A total of 12 176 people have been affected by cholera with 118 deaths in the capital city of Luanda.

Angola is to draw up measures designed to prevent an outbreak of bird flu, which has been officially declared in three African nations, according to a parliamentary decree. A committee of experts from the military, health sectors and government organisations has been set up to chart a programme of action.

Hopes of democratic elections in Angola during the new year faded on Friday after warnings it would take many months to register voters in the vast, mine-strewn Southern African nation.

Eleven African countries organising the next summit on the troubled Great Lakes region set for December will meet in Angola next week to prepare a pact on border security, a United Nations official said on Thursday. The meeting will also discuss protecting displaced people and setting up a regional certification scheme for natural resources so that they are not used to finance wars.

About 2 000 families in five Angolan provinces are facing famine with malnutrition affecting up to 60% of the population, according to a recent study by the United Nations World Food Programme. In some remote areas, Angolans are living on one meal a day, while babies aged six to 20 months are suffering the most from malnutrition as drinking water is not available, said the study.

Angola plans to begin rebuilding its roads destroyed in the 1975-2002 civil war, starting with a 300km stretch between the capital Luanda and the northern agricultural and mining province of Uige, the national road body said on Tuesday. Almost all of the country’s main roads are unusable after the war.

A place at the 2006 World Cup in Germany seemed a distant prospect for Angola less than two years ago after a disastrous start to their qualifying campaign. But the Palancas Negros face Nigeria in Kano on Saturday knowing a draw will keep them top of Group 4 and within sight of a first appearance at the quadrennial international football showcase.

Côte d’Ivoire President Laurent Gbagbo has accused the United Nations of treating African nations like ”colonies”, by siding with their former colonial rulers in decisions about the continent. ”As far as Côte d’Ivoire goes, the Security Council systematically turns to France,” Gbagbo told Angolan state media on Monday.

The death toll from the outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus in Angola has reached 280, most of whom succumbed to the disease in the northern Uige province, the health ministry and the World Health Organisation said late on Monday. The Ebola-like Marburg virus can kill a healthy person in a week.

The world’s worst outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus has so far claimed 253 lives in Angola, a joint statement by the Southern African nation’s health ministry and the World Health Organisation said on Thursday. ”The epidemic is under control … It is waning,” Deputy Health Minister Jose van Dunem said recently.

The death toll from an outbreak of the Marburg virus in Angola has climbed to 244, authorities said. The health ministry and World Health Organisation said in a joint statement on Thursday that the number of fatalities rose by five over the previous 24 hours. Authorities said they recorded no new cases from Wednesday to Thursday.

Angolan health officials said on Wednesday that the death toll from the Ebola-like Marburg virus is climbing still, reaching 239, but at a slower rate as more citizens are joining in a mass effort to stamp out the disease. A total of 518 people are under observation, of whom 406 are in Uige, after coming in contact with the virus.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended that four countries go on a Marburg alert around Angola, the epicentre of an outbreak of the deadly Ebola-like virus that has now claimed 174 lives, a top health official said on Thursday. The death toll from the virus has more than doubled in the past three weeks.

Angola’s Parliament on Wednesday passed a resolution asking the government of President Eduardo dos Santos for rapid measures to combat the outbreak of the deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus, which has now killed 159 people. It was the first parliamentary move in Angola to fight the untreatable haemorrhagic fever.

The Marburg virus has reached a fourth province in Angola, bringing the nationwide toll from the Ebola-like disease to 130, Angola’s health ministry and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday. The official death toll from the disease had stood at 126 on Thursday, since the worst global outbreak of the virus started six months ago.

”If peacetime Angola is to lift itself out of the slough of poverty, the government must open its books to scrutiny, and donors, industry and the international community need to take a tough stance to ensure this happens”, says Doug Steinberg, the outgoing country director of the humanitarian NGO, Care. He shares his views on the eve of his departure.

Panic and ignorance abounded on Tuesday in Angola as the war-ravaged country’s skeletal medical staff grappled with the worst ever outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus, which has claimed a record toll. The mood was a sombre one in hospitals in Luanda among doctors and nurses attending to patients who may or may not be infected with the killer virus.

The death toll in an outbreak of the deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus in Angola has risen to 113, with 111 deaths in a northern province and two in the capital, Luanda, health officials said on Friday. Three-quarters of the deaths were children under the age of five, according to the World Health Organisation.

A deadly haemorrhagic fever that has claimed the lives of 96 people, mainly children, in Angola’s northern Uige province has been identified as the rare Marburg virus, officials from the ministry of health and the World Health Organisation said late on Tuesday. The illness is from the same family as the deadly Ebola virus.

An outbreak of an unidentified haemorrhagic fever has claimed the lives of 93 people in northern Angola, Deputy Minister of Health Jose van Dunem said late on Monday. Angolan health officials have asked the Centers for Disease Control in the United States to conduct tests to determine whether the fever is caused by the Ebola virus.

An outbreak of an unidentified haemorrhagic fever has claimed the lives of 87 people in northern Angola over the past four months, health ministry spokesperson Carlos Alberto said on Friday. The ministry is awaiting the results of samples sent to Senegal and the United States to identify the strain of the fever.

A major police operation in Angola against illegal diamond prospectors was a success, with tens of thousands of mostly Congolese prospectors expelled from the country, officials said. Police estimate they have cleared more than 100 000 illegal prospectors, as well as their families, from the diamond areas.

At least 20 people, among them many children, were killed in Angola and scores more injured after a truck ploughed into a crowd of carnival revellers on Tuesday, Angolan media reported. The accident, in the city of Lubango in southern Huila province, happened when the vehicle appeared to lose control of its brakes.

Although Angola applied for funding to fight malaria, the money will arrive too late to switch to more effective combination drugs and avoid another grim season of preventable deaths. Stamping out the scourge — one of the biggest killers of Angolan children — is considered a top priority by many in the health ministry, but events have undermined the good intentions of the government.

Angola is losing -million a day due to a flourishing illicit trade in diamonds, Mining Minister Manuel Africano said on Tuesday, as new sales plans were announced in Belgium. More than 300 000 foreigners have been deported from Angola as part of a crackdown on diamond traffickers, police announced in September.