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Uganda: 97 Dead as Epidemic Ravages the North
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The Monitor (Kampala)
1 August 2008
Posted to the web 1 August 2008
Evelyn Lirri
Kampala
The government yesterday announced an emergency plan to fight the Hepatitis E epidemic in northern Uganda after the death toll from the preventable disease rose to 97.
At least 25 people have died in the two weeks since July 17 when the Ministry of Health last issued an update, while the number of infected people rose from 4,829 to 5,779 in the last fortnight.
Health Minister Stephen Mallinga told journalists in Kampala yesterday that the government was launching a Shs10 billion "accelerated emergency response plan" to contain the epidemic in Kitgum, Pader and Gulu districts.
Hepatitis E is an acute viral disease that can cause liver failure. The virus is transmitted to humans through consumption of drinks or food contaminated with faecal matter.
An infected person develops a fever, headache, general body weakness, muscle pains and eventually develops yellow eyes and passes urine of a deep yellow colour. Hepatitis E initially struck Kitgum District in October 2007, but has since spread to Gulu, Pader and Yumbe.
The Health minister revealed that while it is not easy to get infected, the appalling hygiene in the affected districts - where many people displaced by the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency live in squalid conditions in camps - had fuelled the disease's spread.
"You have to take in a substantial amount of faeces -- about one gram-- to be able to get Hepatitis E," Dr Mallinga said. "I don't think anyone intends to eat faeces but because of poor hygiene they end up consuming food with faeces."
He added: "The main thrust of the accelerated response will be to break the transmission chain at individual and household levels where the problem originates."
The emergency response will focus on teaching residents about proper hygiene, improvement of sanitation through construction of boreholes and pit latrines in internally displaced people's camps, and monitoring infected people to ensure they are treated.
Dr Mallinga told a press conference yesterday that the ministry and other partners also plan to strengthen early disease detection and reporting by village health teams and community members.
"The accelerated response will also reinforce case management through provision of medicines and supplies and increase the number of qualified health workers in some health facilities," he said. Gulu District Woman MP Betty Ochan said the epidemic has affected every sub county in the Acholi sub region with women being more prone.
"The Ministry of Health should send film vans to carry out sensitisation because much as we are blaming the local leaders for not doing enough to sensitise the people, the people at the centre have also not done much," she said. "We need these technical people to tell us what interventions they have put in place."
The Ministry of Health has also discouraged the use of clay pots to store drinking water, which they say were found to be harbouring the Hepatitis E virus. Instead, the population is being urged to use chlorine to purify their water before drinking. Twenty-litre jerry cans will also be given to people in the affected districts to store their drinking water.
The acting World Health Organisation representative, Dr Jean Baptiste Tapko, pledged more support to control the outbreak. "We are committed to supporting the government to prevent and control this outbreak. In this regard we are supporting training of village health teams," he said.
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Uganda has recently been hit by a string of epidemics including; Ebola, Meningitis, cholera, Bubonic plague in West Nile and yellow fever. A rare strain of cholera ravaged the eastern districts Pallisa, Tororo, Butaleja, Mbale and Manafwa in June, killing 28 people out of 350 who were infected.
How many deaths will it take for the Ugandan government to be serious about the Hepatitis E outbreak?
Also, people might stop blaming the victims and instead insist the government provides adequate water and sanitation!
With 100+ people sharing a latrine in many districts and the contamination of ground water, the disease will continue to spread.
These are the SAME conditions the government found in 2005 when it did a mortality study of the so-called "protected villages" and found an excess death rate of 1,000 people per week.
Preventable conditions and diseases like cholera and malnutrition killed thousands in the "death camps", and continue to die because of government and donor neglect.
Donors to Uganda must help the state reform immediately, or be party to its genocidal policies.
Museveni has millions of dollars if not billions to buy presidential jets, and build a palace at Entebbe, and host CHOGM but not enough money to build boreholes and latrines in the north.Medicines rot in Government stores or are out of date if they ever reach the north. Showing films about sanitation is a sideshow, so long as there are not enough latrines and boreholes. This is a 10+ years disaster...The conditions in which people have had to live are outrageous...and Museveni has the nerve to blame the locals.President Museveni has prevented the conditions in the north from being described... [Read Full Text]
The responsibility to protect citizens by Governments does not mean solely "by the gun". 97 people have died and nearly 6000 are reported ill from Hepititis E in the north. And these are only the reported cases!The numbers of people dying from other preventable diseases due to lack of access to clean water and latrines is staggering, far exceeding those killed by the LRA(bad as they are). It is deliberate Museveni Government policies to pack people into abysmal camps by the thousands with hardly any provisions for water sources, and totally inadequate numbers of latrines over a period of well... [Read Full Text]
Neither the decade of sanitation, the receipt of money from the US and other donors that fund 52 percent of Uganda's budget, nor monies received under the Peace and Reconstruction Fund seems to have reached to the most basic of levels, to provide adequate sanitation and clean water. Evidently, there is no political will by the government of Uganda to provide this fundamental service. This epidemic was in its' early stages last year. A plan could have been put in action then, but now, deadly Hepatitis E has spread to more districts in the North.
The woes of the... [Read Full Text]
It seems like it's not the same the death in EU / USA and the death in a poor country, especialy if this country has a lot to offer in our wallets. I write... our wallets, because the people in those countries have not wallets or money either.
I hope we will understand someday that what is happening in Africa now can happen everywhere in the world too, if we let it.
It's time to open our eyes and our hearts!
Hope, faith and love... but the greatest of these is love.
It is peculiar to say the least that Dr Malinga would rationalize this epidemic's spread by giving the graphic example of how much faeces a person would have to ingest, in order to get sick and eventually die
"You have to take in a substantial amount of faeces -- about one gram-- to be able to get Hepatitis E," Dr Mallinga said. "I don't think anyone intends to eat faeces but because of poor hygiene they end up consuming food with faeces."
This is strange, because that NEED NOT HAPPEN, if there were sufficient latrines and clean water in the... [Read Full Text]
People ought not die from preventable diseases when its government is 52% DONOR SPONSORED and UNICEF and other large NGO's are in charge of sanitation and hygiene.What's the use of "foreign aid" when it doesn't help the people it is intended for?
Accountability is a must in order to save the lives of innocent African children.
A genocide has been taking place in northern Uganda for the last 20+ years in full view of the entire world under Yoweri Museveni's NRM regime; Hepatitis E is yet another epidemic that has been allowed to grow out of control.
Recognize the genocide... [Read Full Text]
This story was reported as a crisis a few months ago in the Monitor newspaper. It's a pity the Ugandan government hasn't acted upon the information it has gathered:
"environmental health experts from the Ministry of Health headquarters have since confirmed that all water sources in the affected areas, except the boreholes, are contaminated."
The US needs to stop supporting such ineptitude.
This epidemic is another one of the manifestations of the benign neglect of the north that the NRM regime has been practicing for the last 23 years. If it is not HIV, ebola, TB or meningitis, it is hepatitis E. Given the horrendous conditions in which people in the forced displacement camps live, this was an emergency waiting to happen. The recent story about a Swede being accused of selling biological weapons to the NRM regime coupled with mysterious deaths of people who disagree with Museveni's policies should make the world raise serious questions about the use of weapons of... [Read Full Text]
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