Monday, August 14, 2006
WAJIR: A rare outbreak of the deadly parasite-borne kala-azar disease has killed six children and infected dozens others in northern Kenya in the past month, medical officials said yesterday.
Of the 52 children admitted at Wajir district hospital, 39 tested positive for the disease that is also known as visceral leishmaniasis and transmitted by the female sandfly.
“Six children have died. All the cases are from the neighbouring and remote district of Isiolo,” said regional medical officer Ahmeddin Omar in Wajir, about 500km northeast of Nairobi.
“Kala-zaar suppresses the immune system of children. When a child is infected, he can even die of a common cold,” he said, warning that many more could die since patients could not reach health facilities because of the remoteness of the region.
Omar said the government had sent emergency drugs to the hospital, but they were not enough in the face out mounting infections.
“If we get 10 more admissions, the drugs will not be enough,” he said, adding that health officials had started spraying homesteads with insecticides in a bid the curb the spread of the infection.
Kala-azar is transmitted by the minuscule sandfly and is fatal if untreated. Its symptoms include irregular bouts of fever, weight loss, swelling of the spleen and liver and anaemia.
In the past, aid workers have reported outbreaks in southern Sudan, a region trying to emerge from more than two decades of war and where health facilities are still rudimentary.
Last year, the disease killed more than 150 people, many of them children, in northern Ethiopia.
About 500,000 cases of the disease are diagnosed each year, more than 90% of them in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sudan as well as Brazil, according to the World Health Organisation
Source: AFP, Aug 14, 2006
