Kenya warns of cholera outbreak after 61 cases reported

Nairobi, Kenya | Xinhua | Kenya’s Ministry of Health on Thursday issued an alert over the cholera outbreak after confirming 61 cases spread in six out of the 47 counties.

Patrick Amoth, the acting director-general of the Ministry of Health, said out of the 61 cases of cholera reported, 13 people were hospitalized, eight were treated and discharged and 40 were outpatient cases.

“The outbreak whose origin can be traced to a wedding festival has spread across Kenya,” he said in a statement issued in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

Amoth noted that the National Public Health Microbiology Laboratory has isolated Vibrio cholera-01-Ogawa as the responsible serotype.

He said the ongoing drought in Kenya, which has affected more than 4 million people, may worsen the outbreak.

To manage the disease, Amoth said all county and sub-county health management teams have been directed to watch out for patients with watery diarrhoea symptoms.

Kenya regularly experiences waves of cholera outbreaks, which the World Health Organization (WHO) attributes to high population density, low access to safe water and proper sanitation, and massive population movements within the country and neighboring ones.

Cholera is an acute “enteric infection caused by the ingestion of bacterium Vibrio cholerae present in contaminated water or food,” according to the WHO.