Deadly outbreak of hepatitis E

2004-08-20 12:01

Geneva - A deadly outbreak of hepatitis E in Sudan's troubled Darfur region is now also affecting refugee camps in Chad where dirty water has caused outbreaks among those who had fled the violence, the United Nations' health body said.

Twenty-one people, most of them women, have died out of 672 probably cases of hepatitis E in Chad between June 26 and August 13, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a statement released on Thursday.

The deaths add to the 27 people already known to have died of the disease, which has affected more than 1 000 people in Darfur.

"This shows the sanitation conditions and the water situation in Darfur and for the refugees in Chad are not adequate," WHO spokesperson Christine McNab said on Friday.

UN delivering water purification

She said WHO was sending a team of experts to the region to investigate the problem.

Hepatitis E has a low mortality rate compared with hepatitis B and C, but its outbreak in Sudan - a country that until now had been free of the disease - and Chad could have a devastating impact among vulnerable people such as pregnant women and children, WHO has said.

The agency, with help from Sudanese health officials and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), is trying to raise awareness about the illness, which is passed person-to-person and is typically linked with dirty water.

It is also delivering water purification tablets.

The UN estimates that up to 50 000 people have been killed in Darfur since rebels rose up in February 2003 against the government in Khartoum, which responded with attacks carried out by a proxy militia on tribes backing the rebellion.

Another 1.2 million people have fled their villages in Sudan and up to 200 000 more have been settled in makeshift camps in equally impoverished eastern Chad.

- AFP