Sep 9 2011
"Cholera epidemics have hit tens of thousands of people and killed more than 1,400 others in seven West and Central African countries since the start of the year, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report on Tuesday," AlertNet reports. According to the news service, affected countries include Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Republic of Congo (Fominyen, 9/7). The Red Cross, which said the outbreak was spreading, expressed concern that it could hit refugee camps along the Sudanese border, according to Agence France-Presse (9/7).
Humanitarian groups are particularly concerned about the ongoing cholera epidemic in Chad, which "has infected 11,000 people and killed 340 others since the start of the year," according to OCHA, which warned in a statement that "[t]here will be about 10,000 new cases [in Chad] by the end of October if nothing is done to stop the trend of more than 1,000 cases of cholera per week," AlertNet writes in a separate article (Fominyen, 9/7).
 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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