Seven people have died and dozens have reportedly been infected with cholera in Tawila in North Darfur on Tuesday and Wednesday. The increased epidemic rates in the locality have led to the resignation of a state health inspector in protest against the government’s silence and denial of cholera.
Public health specialist at the Ministry of Health in North Darfur, Esam Osman Zakaria, who resigned from the ministry in protest against the government’s silence and denial of cholera, told Radio Dabanga that “Kabkabiya is facing a terrible shortage of medical staff working in the hospital amid increasing increase in cases of cholera”.
Zakaria said that he resigned from the Department of Health Promotion in the Ministry “because of misty reports on ‘watery diarrhoea’ in Kabkabiya, the Director General and the Ministry’s cover up and non-response to the demands of the teams that have been sent to the area.”
He said:
“The suspected cases, which enter the screening centre do not find care and are supposed to not wait for two minutes if the disease appear it has to be turned into the isolation room, the doctor must always be in the centre”. Unfortunately, most of those who died at the screening centre because of diarrhoea because patients stay there for three days, and sometimes patients get sick because of non-sterilisation”.
Activists in voluntary work in Kabkabiya praised the step and said that Zakaria is right in his decision to resign considering that the issue is humanitarian and must be treated with transparency. A woman activist from Kabkabiya announced to Radio Dabanga that on Wednesday four people died of cholera in Ghurrat El Zawya Hospital and 54 others have been infected.
She said that the deterioration of the situation amid a lack of medicine in the hospital 30 kilometres north-west of Kabkabiya prompted the local health authorities to resort to the organisation of Doctors without Borders (MSF) to provide more local cadres and medicines to save the situation.
In Kabkabiya Four people died of cholera in the city hospital on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Tuesday a woman activist in voluntary work in Kabkabiya told Radio Dabanga that the cholera isolation centre in the hospital recorded four deaths on Tuesday and Wednesday. She announced the existence of 22 hospitalised cases inside the centre still receiving treatment.
Original source: Radio Dabanga.
Posted on 3 August 2017.
