The Director of the Cholera Unit at the Buea Hospital in Cameroon, Dr Martin Mokake, has hinted that the situation regarding the outbreak of Cholera has subsided for two straight weeks in the Buea region although towns like Limbe and Tiko remain in the spotlight with nearly 100 new infections in Cameroon.
Cheering news comes after Cameroon’s Health Minister, Manaouda Malachie, last week revealed that there has been an outbreak of cholera that has killed 29 people in the past week and 260 new have been recorded.
In total, there have been 4627 patients and 105 deaths since the recent cholera outbreak.
“The situation here has indeed stabilized, we have had many cases, we have had a cumulative 350 cases of patients who have been treated following this disease, and among them, we have had 6 deaths from cholera. At the moment we have 9 patients hospitalized because we released some of them this morning” said Dr. Martin Mokake.
“While the cholera pandemic situation seems to be improving here in Buea in the South West regional capital, towns like Limbe and Tiko remain in the spotlight with nearly 100 new infections as announced by the Cameroonian Minister of Public Health in a tweet between March 25 and April 5”.
Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholera. Cholera remains a global threat to public health and an indicator of inequity and lack of social development. Researchers have estimated that every year, there are roughly 1.3 to 4.0 million cases, and 21 000 to 143 000 deaths worldwide due to cholera.
“At the beginning, many people believed in the idea that cholera does not exist, but when the epidemic really started to grow not only in Tiko, when they learnt that there are deaths in Buea, Limbe, they started to believe in the existence of cholera. Some of them were even forced to come here to the treatment centre, seeing their relatives in bad shape, vomiting, they were convinced that it exists”.
Another cause behind the outbreak is the glaring lack of toilets and drinking water for the population.
“Generally it is due to the poor quality of access to water and the deplorable sanitary conditions. The state of the toilets is really not good in Likomba and in the whole town of Tiko, some people don’t even have toilets, and they relieve themselves directly in streams, and the inhabitants depend on these streams to drink, and it’s so bad”, concluded Dr. Meguete Eposi.