Rains, diseases hit Kenya

2006-04-26 09:00

Otto Bakano

Wajir - Sitting on thin foam mattresses sprawled across a crude cement floor in drought-stricken northern Kenya, dozens of mothers nurse emaciated babies as flies hover around mosquito netting.

The odours of medicine and sweat mixed with the treacle stench of disease hanged in the fetid air under the iron roof of this hospital annex.

Set up to take in overflow from the packed paediatric ward, it too was filled with infants howling and batting futilely at feeding tubes in their nostrils.

These were the latest victims of a drought that had put more than 11 million people across East Africa at risk of starvation, 3.5 million of them in Kenya, where recent heavy rains had exacerbated already dire conditions.

Vital humanitarian access

Far from a blessing, the downpours were proving a curse for the hungry people of Wajir, flooding the parched soil, forcing families from homes, cutting off roads and vital humanitarian access and spreading deadly disease.

Since early April, this government hospital, about 500km northeast of Nairobi, had seen a huge increase in patients suffering from water and mosquito-borne illnesses.

Officials said that at the height of the drought two months ago, most admissions were for malnutrition, but most patients now also suffered from diarrhoea, malaria or pneumonia and were in an even more precarious state.

A medical officer, Aluvaala Seme, said: "With the recent rains, the rate of diarrhoea-related diseases have increased and those who have moderate and moderately severe malnutrition have tipped over to severe malnutrition."

He said that at least 66 patients had been hospitalised here, the only health care facility in Kenya's 56-square-kilometre Wajir district, more than half with those symptoms and five children and an adult had died in April.

Massive water contamination

Officials said that the onset of the seasonal rains might have broken the drought, but it had also led to massive water contamination as the heavy drops filtered through thousands of rotting cattle carcasses that still littered the ground.

They said that pools of stagnant water had become breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes and the rain had brought lower temperatures to this arid region, leading to an increase in respiratory problems like pneumonia.

Making matters worse, measles, believed to be caused by an influx of not immunised herders seeking water and pasture for depleted flocks, had erupted, affecting at least 64 people, many of them children, since February.

And the worst might be yet to come. According to aid agencies, the news of the rains would dry up emergency relief contributions at a time when many livestock-dependent pastoralists scrounged to regenerate their herds.

Yusuf Ibrahim, an official with the British charity Oxfam, said: "The most challenging thing is when it does not continue to rain. So, many families here have lost their entire stocks."

- AFP