DURBAN (AP)--Between 600 and 800 people are infected by cholera each day in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, and the epidemic shows no sign of abating, health officials said Monday.
Since August last year, 85 people have died in South Africa of the highly infectious waterborne disease -- 78 of them in KwaZulu-Natal -- while some 30,000 people have been infected.
Dr. Zweli Mkhize, the provincial health minister, was reported by the South African Press Association as saying the epidemic could last until the end of 2002, with the rate of new infections only expected to drop with the onset of winter.
The epidemic's spread has been attributed to a lack of access to water and proper sanitation in rural areas.
Cholera has also been diagnosed in the Northern Province where six people have died and more than 200 have been diagnosed with the disease. More than 1,000 people were treated for severe diarrhea in the province, the cause of which has yet to be established. Another seven people have died, but authorities had yet to establish why.
A small number of cholera cases has been diagnosed in the central Gauteng province, the eastern Mpumalanga province and North West province.
The epidemic is the country's biggest since the early 1980s. Between 1980 and 1984 more than 105,400 people contracted cholera and 342 died in four consecutive epidemics.
For every person who becomes ill, there are at least 10 other carriers who could spread the disease, Mkhize told the KwaZulu-Natal provincial parliament Monday.
He said that without the government's measures to contain the disease, hundreds of thousands of people could have become infected.
Preventive measures also had kept the death rate to just 0.4% -the lowest worldwide for the disease. Most of the deaths occurred before medical assistance could be administered.
Source: Dow Jones Newswires. The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 29, 2001.