DAKAR: A young girl, unconscious by the time her mother brought her to a rural clinic in southern Burkina Faso, had the classic symptoms of meningitis: fever, stiffness, vomiting.
With treatment, doctors hoped to be able to save her life although she may be permanently disabled: deafness, epilepsy or paralysis are among the effects of the disease.
This latest outbreak in the remote Leraba region bordering Ivory Coast triggered alarms far away in the capital, Ouagadougou, amid fears of another epidemic wave of the disease.
In the arid Sahel region south of the Sahara, every year from December through May thousands of people, many of them children, get meningitis. Up to one in 10 who contract the disease die.
Africa's “meningitis belt”, stretching from Senegal to Ethiopia through some of the world's poorest and most war-scarred places including Sudan's Darfur, accounts for more than half the cases of the disease worldwide each year.
Climate conditions such as dust wind and cold nights increase the risk of the illness along with overcrowded living and the movement of large populations.
Now health workers using high-tech methods to diagnose, control and even predict the disease hope to reduce its grim toll.
They say a new low-cost vaccine, lasting longer than those currently available, could be available as soon as 2009. A new test should make diagnosis quicker. And by studying the climate, they hope to be able to tell in advance where the disease will hit, and intervene before the first patient gets sick.
Experts say the new vaccine could eradicate meningitis from a community in much the same way that sustained vaccinations have all but wiped out polio worldwide.
“That is going to change the face of epidemic meningitis in the region,” said William Perea, a World Health Organization (WHO) meningitis expert.
NEW EPIDEMIC: Meningitis cases in the region reached a 20-year low in 2005. But then by April 2006, more than 30,000 had been reported to the WHO -- five times as many as the previous year.
The pattern is typical. Since the 1970s, there have been meningitis epidemic waves every decade or so, each lasting three to four years.
Experts say last year's surge signals the start of another major epidemic in the Sahel region. In a worst-case scenario, according to WHO estimates, there could be as many as 160,000 cases in the next two years.
Meningitis is an infection of the thin lining that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. It is caused by different bacteria but when diagnosed early and treated with antibiotics many patients recover fully.—Reuters
