 | | 02-19-2005, 02:39 PM |
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| Plague outbreak feared in Congo
From The Boston Globe ... Quote: 61 mine workers dead, hundreds ill, and thousands flee
CAPE TOWN -- International health officials warned yesterday that 61 miners in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo have died and hundreds have become ill from what seems to be the largest outbreak in decades of a highly virulent, airborne version of plague.
Health officials said thousands more workers have fled the open-pit diamond mine that is the epicenter of the outbreak, possibly spreading the disease deep into a rural province with few health facilities.
''It can pop up in many places now," said Marian van der Snoek, a medical official with the Swiss aid group Medair, who spoke by phone from her office in Bunia, in Congo's northeast corner. ''We don't know where these people have fled."
The World Health Organization, the Congolese government and several aid agencies are seeking to determine the extent of the epidemic and to train medical workers in the region to detect the disease, which attacks the lungs and is spread mainly by coughing. Left untreated, the disease kills the overwhelming majority of its victims.
Pneumonic plague is rarer and more frequently fatal than bubonic plague, which is spread by the bites of rat-borne fleas. Bubonic plague caused millions of deaths in Europe in devastating medieval epidemics.
Antibiotics and other modern medicines have made both forms of the disease uncommon in the developed world, but plague is endemic throughout much of Africa and the developing world. In eastern Congo alone, there are typically 1,000 cases in a year. Only 2 percent of the worldwide cases of plague each year are pneumonic.
Health officials were especially alarmed at their inability to rapidly contain the outbreak at the diamond mine. The first cases have been traced to December, in the days after the mine opened after a period of disuse. The nearest health facilities are primary care centers several miles away, each with only a few beds.
It took nearly two months for plague to be identified as the likely cause of the series of deadly lung infections among the miners. By then, most of those exposed to the disease had left the area.
''It's very important to isolate, quarantine people," May Chu, a plague specialist at the WHO, said in a conference call with reporters announcing the outbreak. ''If we can find the cases and treat them effectively, this can be solved."
The mine, in the remote town of Zobia, employed 7,000 workers from throughout the region. An estimated 400 are sick, and most of the other miners have fled, health officials said. They said Congolese soldiers, who apparently control the mine, remain there.
The region has been the scene of years of warfare, fueled in part by the struggle for control of rich natural resources such as diamonds. The war ended officially with a peace deal in 2002, but violence and instability are common throughout eastern Congo, limiting the access of humanitarian groups.
Years of war have left the area among the world's poorest and least healthy.
| __________________ quaeque ipse miserrima vidi et quorum pars magna fui (All these terrible things I saw, a great part of which I was) - Virgil, The Aeneid |
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