Some 1,800 dead from cholera in Ebola-hit DR Congo

Cholera has killed around 1,800 people so far this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is also battling its deadliest Ebola outbreak, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

Some 60,000 cases of the diarrhoeal disease have been recorded in what the UN health agency’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described as the vast central African country’s “worst cholera outbreak in decades”.

Most of the infections had been detected in the DRC’s eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, both prey to a litany of armed groups and partly under the control of the Rwanda-backed M23 militia, Tedros said.

“But the concern is now there are also cases following the Congo river basin, which means that could stretch up to Kinshasa,” the capital, he added.

As with the ongoing Ebola epidemic, cholera’s spread in hard-to-access and remote regions long plagued by conflict is hampering the response.

Those areas now face the prospect of a rampant cholera outbreak on top of the raging Ebola epidemic, the WHO warned.

The agency also feared that the ongoing rainy season would help the waterborne disease’s spread, including in Kinshasa, a densely populated metropolis on the Congo river.

The mortality rate is around three percent, which is high for cholera.

Tedros insisted that a campaign to distribute Ebola vaccines, especially in the conflict-hit east, would be “very, very important”.