One dead in typhoid fever outbreak

One person has died and at least 50 have been taken ill in an unprecedented outbreak of typhoid fever in the northern rain forests of Gabon, national radio announced on Friday. Around 50 cases of the water-borne disease have been registered over the past month in Oyem, a town of 35,000 people located near the northern border with Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon, following repeated breakdowns of the local water supply system. Health officials told the radio that cases had also been noted in various other towns in the Grand Nord region, which is home to 110,000 people, notably in Minvoul and Mitzic. The only fatality so far was registered in Oyem, which lies 411 km northeast of the capital Libreville. “This is the first typhoid fever alert in the region and in Gabon,” Julien Meye, a doctor at the endemic diseases service in Libreville, told IRIN. He said the disease first appeared in Oyem following several months of disruption to the town's supply of drinking water. Meye said the authorities were launching a massive information campaign in primary schools in the area to help children learn how to avoid catching salmonella typhi, the enteric pathogen which causes typhoid. Typhoid fever is spread by the faecal-oral route and is often associated with poor food hygiene and inadequate sanitation. It is most prevalent among children aged 5 to 12. The people of Oyem complained last October of systematic water and electricity cuts and some of the villages in the surrounding area have not had water for several months. “We have to drink rain water and when it doesn’t rain we’re short of water,” one villager said recently on national television. The deputy mayor of Oyem, Emmanuel Obame Ondo, has blamed the privatisation of water supply services for the breakdown in distribution, saying the country’s water and electricity utility, SEEG, had failed to extend water pipes to newly built areas. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates there are about 16 million cases of typhoid a year worldwide, of which approximately 600,000 end in death. About 70 percent of all fatalities occur in Asia.