Two more people in Equatorial Guinea have died of Marburg haemorrhagic fever, a cousin of the Ebola virus, bringing the toll of fatalities to 11, the authorities say.

“Two days ago, the monitoring system recorded eight notifications, including the deaths of two people with symptoms of the disease,” Health Minister Mitoha Ondo’o Ayekaba said in a statement issued late Tuesday.

Work is underway “to strengthen assessment of the spread of the epidemic,” said the statement, read on national television.

“Forty-eight contact cases have been documented, four of whom have developed symptoms, and three who have been quarantined in hospital,” it added.

The Marburg virus is a rare but highly dangerous pathogen that causes severe fever, often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure.

It is part of the so-called filovirus family that also includes the Ebola virus, which has wreaked havoc in several previous outbreaks in Africa.

The central African state announced on February 13 that nine people had died from Marburg between January 7 and February 7.

The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) held an emergency session the following day.

The national authorities have declared a health alert in the remote northeastern province of Kie-Ntem province and in the neighbouring district of Mongomo, which are located on the border with Cameroon and Gabon.

Measures include a lockdown plan implemented in collaboration with the WHO.

In their statement of February 13, the authorities had reported only three cases of infection in addition to the fatalities — individuals who were being isolated with “mild symptoms” in hospital.

The natural host of the Marburg virus is the African fruit bat, which carries the virus but does not fall sick from it.

But the animals can pass the virus to primates in close proximity, including humans, and human-to-human transmission then occurs through contact with blood or other bodily fluids.

Fatality rates in confirmed cases have ranged from 24 percent to 88 percent in previous outbreaks, depending on the virus strain and case management, according to the WHO.

There are currently no approved vaccines or antiviral treatments.

Potential treatments, including blood products, immune therapies and drug therapies, as well as early candidate vaccines are being evaluated, the WHO says.

Source: AFP

You never know what you have until you lose it and this aptly applies to the people of Mamfe, indeed, the entire Manyu Division following the burning of the Division’s lone hospital.

It is almost one year since some God-forsaken arsonists set the Mamfe District Hospital on fire and for one year, the population of Manyu Division has been dealing with a challenging situation as the people are passing through tough health challenges.

Although the government promptly relocated the services which were provided by the Mamfe District Hospital to the preventive health facility in Mamfe, the services at the hospital’s new location leave much to be desired, as health staffs are now bound to treat through guesswork instead by running tests because there are no pieces of medical equipment.

The equipment at the Mamfe District Hospital was damaged alongside the infrastructure when the arsonists set the hospital ablaze.

Many people are dropping dead like flies in Mamfe due to the lack of equipment to properly diagnose their diseases with a view to providing much-needed treatment.

This was the case of a nurse who worked at the Mamfe District Hospital before the heartless arsonists sent an entire people into a state of medical uncertainty.

Mbi Semoh, a native of  Ndekwai, a village some four miles from the Mamfe District Hospital, spent a good part of her life helping the sick at that hospital before the hospital was burned down to ashes. Nobody ever thought that the very first victims of this unfortunate situation would be health workers who had spent their entire lives helping others.

Ms. Mbi last week lost her battle against an unknown illness which had attacked her just a few days earlier.

The absence of state-of- the-art equipment implied Ms. Mbi would take medication without knowing exactly what was ailing her.

The time of voodoo medicine has long gone, but Manyu Division, one of the Divisions in the country with many intellectuals, has been rolled back into the dark ages when demon-possessed arsonists set a modern health facility on fire one year ago.

Ms. Mbi’s case is not isolated. Children, women and the old are dropping dead in Mamfe and it seems nothing can be done to stem this tide of death which is sending many sons and daughters of Manyu to an early grave.

The Mamfe District Hospital is a government health facility and government matters are usually painfully slow.

Nobody knows if there is a budget for the reconstruction of the Mamfe District Hospital which has stood the people of Manyu in good stead for decades.

While things appear to be gloomy, there is however a silver lining on the dark ominous clouds which have been hanging over Manyu for a year.

Manyu sons and daughters around the world are concerned about the family members they have left behind.

No true son or daughter of Manyu forgets his people, even when he or she has been away from home for decades.  Putting smiles on the faces of his or her relatives is the hallmark of the Manyu man and woman, and this explains why there were spontaneous reactions when news that the lone hospital in Manyu Division had been burned down.

In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, women associations, especially MOHWA, immediately sprang into action to mobilize resources for the equipment of the hospital once the government completes the reconstruction. There are CFAF millions sitting in Banks in the West waiting for the right moment for them to migrate to Cameroon.

MECA Toronto in Canada also has a running fundraiser and many people have already sent in their modest contributions though there will still be a massive fundraiser for the hospital in the summer of 2023.

Back home, the Division’s political authorities led by the Minister in Charge of Special Duties at the Presidency, Victor Mengot Arrey, have also raised money for the Mamfe District Hospital and they too are frustrated with the long wait as they are aware that death is hanging over their people like the Sword of Damocles.

A source close to the government has revealed that Manyu Members of Parliament have been in touch with the Minister of Public Health about this hospital.

The source added that a Manyu MP even asked questions during a parliamentary plenary session in November 2022 to the Minister of Public Health about the burned down hospital.

The source also added that Minister Mengot had been active, stressing that he had contacted the Reconstruction Program when Minister Tassong was the Coordinator and something concerning the Mamfe District Hospital is in the pipeline.

Despite these efforts, the people of Manyu Division will have to continue to wait, though death is threatening to claim more lives. The desperation in Manyu has driven many people into the waiting hands of false prophets who are doing their best to offer false consolation in a situation which clearly needs vivid medical solutions.

Due to the uncertainty, many Manyu sons and daughters around the world are calling on those responsible for fundraisers abroad to purchase equipment and send home with whatever is available.

They are calling on MOHWA and Ekpe to step up to the plate and provide much-needed leadership during these trying moments. EKPE USA, in particular, is expected to come up with a clear plan on how more money can be raised for state-of-the- art equipment to be purchased and sent home.

By Dr. Joachim Arrey

New cases of a deadly hemorrhagic fever have been detected in Cameroon, after a deadly outbreak was declared in neighbouring Equatorial Guinea.

Cameroonian authorities detected two suspected cases of Marburg disease in Olamze, a border commune, the public health delegate for the region, Robert Mathurin Bidjang, said on Tuesday.

Equatorial Guinea officially declared its first outbreak of Marburg, an illness similar to Ebola, on Monday. It quarantined more than 200 people and restricted movement last week in its Kie-Ntem province, where the fever was first detected.

The Marburg virus causes a highly infectious disease that can have a fatality rate of up to 88 per cent, according to the WHO. There are no approved vaccines or antiviral treatments to treat it.

The small Central African country has so far reported nine deaths as well as 16 suspected cases of the disease which causes fever, fatigue and blood-stained vomit and diarrhoea, according to the WHO.

The World Health Organisation said earlier it was increasing its epidemiological surveillance in Equatorial Guinea and re-deploying COVID-19 teams to the area.

“Surveillance in the field has been intensified,” said George Ameh, WHO’s country representative in Equatorial Guinea.

“Contact tracing, as you know, is a cornerstone of the response. We have […] redeployed the COVID-19 teams that were there for contact tracing and quickly retrofitted them to really help us out.”

“We’re working on a 30-day response plan where we should be able to quantify what are the exact measures and quantify what are the exact needs,” Ameh said.

Neighbouring Cameroon had restricted movement along the border to avoid contagion.

“On the 13 of February, we had two suspected cases. These are two 16-year-old children, a boy and a girl, who have no previous travel history to the affected areas in Equatorial Guinea,” Bidjang said at a meeting in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde.

Forty-two people who came into contact with the two children have been identified and contact tracing was ongoing, he added.

Source: Reuters

It is almost one year since the Manyu District hospital was burned down to ashes. The Mamfe District Hospital was the best in the Division and it did, indeed, stand the population in good stead for more than four decades.

No one could have suspected that such a health facility could be razed, but the war which has pitted Cameroon’s English-speaking minority against the country’s government has brought out the worst in human beings.

The devil seem to have found work for many idle hands in the two English-speaking regions of the country and the anger and frustration triggered by years of marginalization and lack of opportunities have made destruction and wickedness fashionable in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions.

The burning of the Mamfe District Hospital in 2022 is one of those tragedies of war which many will never be forgotten. Since the burning of the hospital, it has not been easy for the population of Mamfe town, indeed, the entire Division which depended on the hospital for its health-care needs.

The population is desperate and though the government had moved critical services to the preventive health facility in Mamfe town, the population is still suffering and holds that the services offered leave much to be desired.

The staffs of the health facility, for their part, are finding it challenging to meet up with the public’s health demands. Due to this unfortunate situation, the death rate in the town has gone up by at least 30% with women and children being the hardest hit.

The Mamfe preventive health-care facility was never designed to deal with intensive care and delivery cases. It has never been endowed with the capacity to deal with heart problems, asthma, kidney failure and other critical illnesses but following the burning of the district hospital, this poorly equipped preventive health facility is now charged with the duty of handling very challenging situations though it is bereft of the proper equipment.

According to a medical officer at the health facility who elected anonymity, preventive medicine and curative medicine are different and tasking the preventive health-care facility with such a challenging task without the proper tools and equipment is one tough job which may result in many deaths.

The health official further explained that with the recent influx of IDPs from neighbouring Akwaya Sub-division where multiple inter-ethnic wars are playing out, the health situation in the Manyu Divisional headquarters has gotten worse.

The IDPs are not only flooding the town, they are also flooding the lone preventive health facility in the town as many of them come with diseases like miseales, scabbies, smallpox, typhoid and other diseases which are hard to handle by the medical staff.

The increasing population is also a source of stress for staff   who are required to work without equipment. Their unfriendly working conditions have been compounded by an acute shortage of well-trained government paid staff and a lack of much-needed medications.

Speaking to the only medical doctor at the health facility, our correspondent in Mamfe   learned that the challenges waiting to be addressed include a lack of proper medical infrastructure, the absence of a modern intensive care unit, the non-existence of a neo-natal unit and a Tuberclosis (TB) unit. A shortage of wards and maternity beds is robbing the health workers at the facility of a good night’s sleep.

 The medical expert also advised that the makeshift health facility was in a dire need of delivery beds, stethoscopes, emergency vans, ambulances, laboratory equipment, x-ray machines, electrocardiograms and essential medications like anagelsics and antibiotics.

The government had promised to take appropriate measures to ensure residents of Mamfe got the care they needed but it is yet to match actions with words.

Manyu citizens in the USA, UK and Canada have been raising funds and they are looking forward to the government creating the appropriate environment for the money raised to be wired to the appropriate quarters for the rebuilding of the destroyed hospital.

It is in this context that Manyu Toronto, Canada, will be organizing a massive fundraiser in the summer to acquire modern equipment for the hospital. Manyu Toronto will be pleased to receive assistance from well-wishers across the globe.

By Dr Joachim Arrey with correspondent reports from Mamfe