Mozambique: Cholera outbreak declared in Montepuez, Cabo Delgado – Watch

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique: Cholera outbreak declared in Montepuez, Cabo Delgado – Watch

3:32 CAT | 06 Jan 2021

Photo: TVM

The Cabo Delgado provincial government has declared a cholera outbreak in Montepuez district, after registering one death and 11 infected people, the secretary of state for the province has announced.

“Laboratory surveillance to determine the causes of diarrhoea has enabled positive cases to be confirmed [since December], which meets the criteria for declaring the cholera outbreak, so we have cholera in Montepuez,” Secretary of State for Cabo Delgado, Armindo Ngunga, is quoted today by Televisão de Moçambique as saying.

Montepuez, with about 200 cases, is the sixth Cabo Delgado district where cholera has been reported since January of last year, after Metuge, Mocímboa da Praia, Macomia, Ibo and the city of Pemba.

In September 2020, the Mozambican prime minister launched a cholera vaccination campaign expected to reach more than 350,000 people in the five affected districts.

“We thought that the situation was going to improve in Metuge and Pemba, but it is not happening because of the movement [of people] occurring, mainly here in Pemba. There are a lot of new people arriving, even coming from areas where the vaccination campaign did not take place,” Ngunga said.

Since the start of the cholera epidemic in the province, 2,125 cholera cases and 37 deaths have been reported, Ngunga said, noting that this was “an increase of more than 100%” compared to 2019, when 282 cases and no deaths were recorded .

According to the authorities, this scenario usually arises during the rainy season in the province because sanitation problems and the drinking on water unfit for human consumption.

Between the months of October and April, Mozambique is typically affected by cyclonic winds from the Indian Ocean and floods originating in the hydrographic basins of southern Africa, in addition to droughts that almost always affect some parts of the south of the country.