Yellow fever spreading

Press, 28 September 1984, Page 24

Yellow fever spreading

The great Sahel drought has caused the deaths of almost 500 people in Ghana and Upper Volta in one of the most devastating outbreaks of jungle yellow fever in recent times. The virus was transmitted by mosquitoes from monkeys living in surrounding trees.

The World Health Organisation Review of Yellow Fever for 1983, soon to be published in Geneva, records the deaths late last year of 487 young teenage Fulani nomads in forest areas of north-west Ghana and eastern Upper Volta (since renamed Burkina Faso). Because of sparse grazing in the Sahelian belt, the cattle herders had trekked further south than normal in search of better pasturage. They camped in the heart of mosquito country. Normally, the Fulani take their

From

cattle north in the rainy season to get out of the tsetse fly belt. This is also the time when the yellow fever mosquitoes are breeding. When the rains stopped at the end of October last year, the danger subsided.

The victims were mostly children under the age of 15, who were less likely than older people to have been vaccinated. Yellow fever is a lethal disease, with death rates varying from 20 to 80 per cent. In Upper Volta, 286 of the 336 notified cases were fatal.

Within days of the first cases being reported in the Fada N’Gourma area of Upper Volta, the vaccination of one million people began. Similar measures were

DENIS HERBSTEIN

in London

taken in Ghana with the help of vaccine and personnel supplied by the W.H.O. and U.N.I.C.EJ'.

Sources at W.H.O. headquarters in Geneva believe that many more may have died — possibly as many as 2000 in Upper Volta alone. The worst yellow fever epidemic ever recorded was in Ethiopia in the early 1960 s when 30,000 people died out of 100,000 cases. Since then there have been serious outbreaks in Ghana and Nigeria. Dr Paul Bres, until recently chief medical officer of the virus diseases unit of the W.H.0., who wrote the report, says that one of the problems is the breakdown of vaccination programmes in many West African countries. “Before independence, the

colonial powers did a certain amount of vaccinating. Now there is. a real danger that a large number of migrant workers from the drier regions of West Africa working in the large cities may be carrying the virus. In the towns, the urban yellow fever mosquito transmits the virus from man to man.”

Dr Bres warned of outbreaks in places like Kano, Abidjan, and Dakar if vaccination was not carried out. That would be far more disastrous than the death figures last year, he adds.Yellow fever is virtually impossible to eradicate because of the vast reservoir of the virus in monkeys. So vaccination, which provides immunity for at least 10 years, is the only effective, largescale preventive measure.—Copyright, London Observer Service.