“the response is adequate”, believes the Minister of Health Frédéric Valletoux

The Minister of Health wanted to be reassuring during a trip to the island in the Indian Ocean, where cholera claimed its first victim: a three-year-old girl.

The day after the death of a three-year-old girl who died of cholera in Mayotte, the Minister of Health, Frédéric Valletoux, arrived on the island. “We see that in Mayotte, the response is adequate”he declared, Thursday, May 9, during a visit to the Kirson district of Koungou, where at least fifty cases have been declared to date.

Since mid-March, 58 cases of cholera have been recorded by the Mahorese authorities, including six active cases at the last report dated May 6. The first cases diagnosed in patients who had not left the island appeared at the end of April.

The first cases of cholera in Mayotte were recorded in mid-March among people returning from neighboring Comoros, where the epidemic has already caused the death of 98 people, according to the latest official report.“In the Comoros, the epidemic started a month and a half earlier, but today there are thousands of cases and almost a hundred deaths,” remarked the minister, wanting to be reassuring.

A protocol developed in February to prevent the spread of the disease provides for the disinfection of the patient’s home, the identification and treatment of contact cases and vaccination by gradually expanding the area concerned around the home of the patient suffering from cholera.

“We vaccinate as much as possible”

During his visit, Frédéric Valletoux spoke with the teams from the Regional Health Agency responsible for disinfecting homes as soon as a case is suspected. “We also distribute antibiotics to relatives and we vaccinate as much as possible, the population is very receptive”explained Olivia Noël, field coordinator, who is one of the 29 reservists who came as reinforcements for “contain the epidemic” in this French island in the Indian Ocean.

Guest of franceinfo on Thursday, infectious disease specialist Benjamin Davido estimated that “so unfortunately, ring vaccination [des cas contacts] is not enough to control things in the coming days, we can quickly find ourselves with 100 cases then 1,000 cases and therefore, in an incompressible way, things can go quickly, and the symbolic figure of a death can transform quickly.” He further said “arehope that the Mahorais [puissent] benefit from aid, largely from the metropolis” with a view to “curbing” the epidemic.

Quoted by AFP, Liot MP from Mayotte, Estelle Youssouffa, recommended relaunching the distribution of bottled water to limit the risks of contamination by unclean water, one of the vectors of transmission of the disease with food contaminated. She finally recalled that “the population, mostly foreign, does not always have a telephone and is often afraid of the authorities,” so “people wait until the last moment” to notify emergency services.