By Lansana Fofana
PORT LOKO, SIERRA LEONE, Oct 10 1999 (IPS)

.Sierra Leone’s northwestern district of Port Loko has been hit by a cholera epidemic which is taking its toil on the population.

Health authorities told IPS this week that more than 40 women and children have been recorded dead as a result of the outbreak of the disease.

The acting district medical and community health officer in Port Loko, Clifford Gamanga, said “the death toll is expected to rise because of the lack of pure drinking water and run down sanitary conditions in the area”.

Gamanga said urgent action was needed to reverse the spread of the disease.

Port Loko district is situated about 115 kilometres northwest of the capital Freetown and had been the scene of repeated clashes between rebel and government forces during Sierra Leone’s eight- year conflict.

With infrastructure badly damaged, more than half of the region’s over 200,000 inhabitants have fled the hostilities.

“Taps and purified water sources were destroyed and the remaining population has been forced to depend on impure water fetched from shallow wells, said Gamanga. “During the fighting earlier this year, dozens of dead people were abandoned on the streets or buried in shallow graves and this may be another cause for the epidemic”.

An estimated 400 patients report at the run-down Port Loko health centre each day for treatment, according to the Ministry of Health and Sanitation.

The situation has further been worsened by the consumption of palm nut oil, mixed with caustic soda, by unscrupulous traders.. Customers, unable to afford palm oil or ordinary cooking oil, have resorted to buying the cheap but poisonous mixture.

At Port Loko hospital, some 300 malnutrition cases have been admitted and 20 acute ones have been rushed to Freetown for urgent treatment.

Non-governmental agencies like the Christian Aid and the Northern Forum recently “donated some quantities of food and drugs” to the township, but the amount was not enough, prompting Port Loko health workers to appeal to the government and NGO’s to increase humanitarian assistance to the vulnerable in the region.

Cholera outbreak has also been wreaking havoc in Freetown. More than 100 people have died of the disease before the authorities put it under control.

Dr. Haroun Turay, the head of the disease prevention and control confirmed to IPS that more than 4,000 cases of bloody diarrhoea and cholera were reported in Freetown.

The government and the World Health Organisation (WHO), along with Medicins sans Frontiers (MSF) and Merlin, have adopted strategies aimed at halting the spread of the epidemic, both in Freetown and in the country’s provincial towns and villages.

B.A. Kawa, in charge of the Health Education Unit at the Ministry of Health, said the government’s determination to eradicate the epidemic is reflected in its deployment of blue flag volunteers in vulnerable communities to attack its spread.

These blue flag volunteers work in camps for displaced victims of the war, over-crowded slum settlements and the eastern surburbs of Kissy and Wellington in Freetown.

“The campaign has been largely successful because we have set up Cholera control centres in many parts of town, where victims go for treatment”, Kawa said.

The blue flag volunteers have also been armed with oral rehydration salt (ORS) solutions which they freely distribute to the needy.

But, in the case of Port Loko, it would take quite a while before the situation is brought under control. The authorities have to address the burning issue of malnutrition and upsurge in hunger in a community that is constantly being harrassed by marauding rebels who, like the impoverished civilian population, want food and medicines. Such are the consequence of war.

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