CHOLERA KILLS 16 AT BOKO HARAM DISPLACED CAMPS IN NORTHEASTERN NIGERIA

The medical charity Medicins Sans Frontieres said on Wednesday that Sixteen people have died in a cholera outbreak at three camps for those made homeless by Boko Haram violence in northeastern Nigeria.

"The official count as of 16th September recorded 172 cholera cases and 16 deaths," MSF, which is also known as Doctors Without Borders, said in an emailed statement. The camps hit by the outbreak were in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno, the Nigerian state most affected by six years of radical Islamist violence that have left at least 15,000 dead and more than two million homeless since 2009.

The first cases of the latest outbreak of cholera, which causes acute diarrhoea, appeared last month in one of the camp sites, which is now home to some 1.4 million displaced.

A clean-up operation was launched after the first cases emerged and identified a contaminated water source in one of the camps, said MSF.

Nigeria's main relief agency the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said only that there had been "one or two cases" in one camp and the outbreak had been "contained". NEMA's northeast coordinator Ibrahim Abdulkadir said the disease "was brought to the camp by some people who were recently liberated from Boko Haram by the military".

"We have been able to manage the situation with the distribution of vaccines and drugs. We are also ensuring that the camps are kept clean at all times," he told AFP.

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