KINSHASA, Jan 29: Outbreaks of cholera and meningitis in the Democratic Republic of Congo have killed more than 300 people, the health minister of the former Zaire state has said. Jean-Baptiste Sondji yesterday said that in the past four months cholera had killed 268 people out of some 1,300 cases registered since January in Kisangani, in the east of the country.He said the death rate, of around 20 percent, was abnormally high. Most of those affected were young recruits in training at the Kapalata Military Camp, where cholera was endemic as a result of poor food and recent flooding of the Congo river and its tributaries. Sondji said the camp would soon be closed to be sterilised. The patients would be transferred to a local hospital which was not yet finished.
Meanwhile, the death toll from a meningitis epidemic at Tembo in the southeast, near the border with Angola, had risen to 38 out of 125 cases, Sondji said.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
