Cholera takes toll in W. Africa

As more and more patients arrived doctors had to put them in storerooms and concrete hallways wet with human waste.

Throughout villages like Ganjuwa and cities across West Africa, the lack of clean drinking water is allowing the waterborne bacterial disease to bloom. In Nigeria, 13,000 people have become ill, according to the nation’s Health Ministry.

Salisu Garba needs only to look at a communal trash pit outside his family’s home in Ganjuwa to see how the cholera bacteria killed his 20-year-old brother. Seasonal rains have turned the trash pit into a pond of raw sewage, which seeps into nearby wells, infecting Garba’s family and others in this rural village in northern Nigeria.

“That pond is a source of worry,’’ Garba said. “We don’t have any hope.’’

“These areas become breeding ground for cholera,’’ said Chris Cormency, a UNICEF official monitoring the epidemic.

Cormency said the disease began in Nigeria and then spread to neighboring Cameroon, where more than 300 people have died and 5,000 have fallen ill. In Chad, more than 40 have died and 600 are sickened, while the disease also has popped up in nearby Niger, he said. It was not immediately clear how many people are affected there.

After someone was found sick with cholera on a train in Cameroon, the other 1,500 people onboard panicked. Health officials gave out antibiotics and tried to decontaminate the train, media in Cameroon reported.

Cholera is a fast-developing, highly contagious infection that causes diarrhea, leading to severe dehydration, and possible death. The current outbreak is the worst in Nigeria since 1991, when 7,654 people died, according to the World Health Organization.

Cholera is easily preventable with clean water and sanitation but in places such as West Africa, sanitation often remains an afterthought in teeming city slums and mud walled villages.

In Nigeria, almost half the country’s 150 million people lack access to clean water and proper sanitation, according to the WHO, even though the government earns billions of dollars a year as one of Africa’s top oil exporters.