SOMALIA: Diarrhoea kills 40 in Puntland

[Enemy_Of_Mad_Mullah]

SOMALIA: Diarrhoea kills 40 in Puntland
11 Dec 2006 13:56:49 GMT
Source: IRIN

Somalia troubles
More NAIROBI, 11 December (IRIN) - An outbreak of watery diarrhoea in Somalia's northeastern self-declared autonomous region of Puntland has claimed the lives of about 40 people over the past five weeks, medical sources said on Monday.

"At least 39 people, 80 percent of them children under the age of five, have died in the last five weeks of watery diarrhoea," Abdirahman Sa'id Mahamud, the Puntland Minster of Health, said.

At least 2,000 cases have been recorded since the outbreak. The first cases were reported in the town of Baran in the disputed (claimed by both Puntland and Somaliland) eastern Sanaag region, 180 km north of Bosasso, the commercial capital of Puntland, where "seven people, five children and two women, died", Mahamud said.

However, he said, all Puntland's seven regions have been affected by the outbreak. At least 300 people were going to hospital every day in the first week of the outbreak to seek treatment, "but the figure gradually increased", he said.

Mahamud blamed heavy rains and contaminated water drawn from water points and wells in the area for the outbreak.

"We suspect the problem is the [contaminated] water people are drinking," he added.

He said the authorities undertook "a very vigorous campaign to deal with the problem and we are now seeing the reported cases beginning to decrease".

He said campaigns to train community groups to go from house to house explaining how to chlorinate water supplies, and health and hygiene awareness campaigns, "were successful".

He added: "We believe we have now contained the problem, with the help of our partners, WHO [World Health Organization] and UNICEF. We could not have done without them."