The manager for national disease surveillance and response, Dr Foday Dadae has put at 4,249 the nationwide number of recorded cases of cholera since the latest outbreak started in January with 72 deaths. He said 685 of that figure was recorded in the Western Area where 14 people, including two children, had been confirmed dead in the last five weeks. Forty cases are being reported daily at Mabayla alone, in the east of Freetown.
Speaking to Politico he said the latest cases started in Yeliboya in the northern Kambia district before spreading to Port Loko and later the southern Pujehun district before reaching Freetown. He said the ministry of health and sanitation was putting in place strategies to ward off the spread but admitted that new cases were coming everyday.
“We have now been able to open cholera treatment centres in different parts of the city” he said, adding that they were promoting hygiene prevention in collaboration with the Freetown City Council.
He said they were “trying to make sure that we control it. Perhaps by next week the numbers will start going down”.
Earlier at a joint press conference held by Government and the United Nations, Minister of Health and Sanitation, Zainab Hawa Bangura, blamed the outbreak on the heavy downpour of rain and the “poor hygiene and water situation” in the affected areas. She said that in the densely populated Mabayla, toilet facilities were a problem and people sell food on the street under appalling health conditions. She said the cholera outbreak was “alarming, an emergency and an epidemic” and warned against open defecation which she said was commonplace in especially the slums of Freetown.
Acting Mayor of Freetown, Gibril Kanu said they wanted to disinfect Mabayla but they could not do so because the traders would not empty the place. “If the traders would allow us we will do it. But if they sell throughout the night how can we do it” Kanu asked, rhetorically. Asked whether they would forcibly close the markets to clean the area, the health minister jumped in and cited human rights considerations.
The Country Representative of the World Health Organisation, Dr Alemu Wondimagegnehu was also at the press conference to commit the UN family’s involvement in the fight to combat the outbreak
