One of the challenges faced by communities in the remotest parts of Ebonyi State is lack of adequate social amenities, especially potable water.

Ebonyi State is said to be one of the states with poor underground water, meaning that streams in most parts of the state are not hygienic enough for drinking.

While inhabitants of urban centres can afford to sink boreholes or buy sachet or bottled water imported into the state, poor folks in the rural areas, due to their poor economic status, struggle to afford clean water.

According to the World Health Organisation, Safe drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are crucial to human health and well-being.

?Safe WASH is not only a prerequisite to health but contributes to livelihoods, school attendance and dignity, and helps to create resilient communities living in healthy environments.

?Drinking unsafe water impairs health through illnesses such as diarrhea, and untreated excreta contaminates ground waters and surface waters used for drinking-water, irrigation, bathing and household purposes.

?This creates a heavy burden on communities,? the organisation says.

It estimates that poor WASH conditions still account for more than one million diarrhea deaths every year and constrain effective prevention and management of other diseases including malnutrition, NTDs and cholera.

Ebonyi State has over the years continued to record many deaths due to poor WASH conditions, particularly diarrhea and cholera and especially in the rural areas.

This year, the state was hit with another outbreak of cholera which the government said claimed 28 lives.

Worst hit is Ndibokote community where at least 14 persons died, according to government estimates, though locals insist the death toll from the community is around 25.

A visit to the community shows that it lacks clean drinking water and there is no public health facility available.

The outbreak, which occurred in September, started when a woman died after she took ill and was passing stool repeatedly.

Egodi Nwiboko, a health worker in the village who works at a chemist shop in the area, noted that after the woman?s death more people who attended her burial died.

She called on government to sink boreholes for the villagers as lack of potable water contributed to the high number of casualties recorded in the outbreak of the virus.

Egodi said: ?We have no water in the community. We drink anything we see as water which contributed to the spread of cholera in the community.

?Government should drill boreholes in the community to save us from the precarious situation.

?There was a day they came into our chemist shop and told us that a woman was passing stool and we went to see the woman.

?But the woman died before we got to her. She was vomiting and passing stool.

?After the woman?s death, people started telling us that there was cholera outbreak in the community.

?We had never experienced such a thing, so we didn?t believe. The woman was buried and many people that attended her burial started passing stool while others were vomiting.

?That was how the disease started spreading.

?As people were vomiting and passing stool, they were dying like chicken. Some died within five minutes that they started passing stool. Some were vomiting.?

The disease would later spread to some other parts of the local government and other nearby local government areas.

In nearby Oferekpe, a woman reportedly died of the disease while in Okpuitimo, in Abakaliki LGA six persons reportedly died while a further 17 persons were hospitalized.

Speaking to our reporter, residents blamed the outbreak on the absence of clean source of water in the community.

A member of the community, Stephen Nwankpuma said the outbreak was caused by consumption of contaminated water. He noted that the disease spread faster after the burial of a female victim in the community.

Nwakpuma said: ?There was a burial last week and also there were others who went and ate a dog killed in the area. Those who went for the burial and those who ate the dog meat were the first to fall sick.

?Those who went to the burial also ate a cow that was killed and prepared in a very dirty environment. The community is located in the remotest part of the state. In fact, it shares boundary with Benue State.

?There is no good source of water in the area. The only borehole in the area is no longer functional.

?The only source of water there now are ponds and a stream, and they are very dirty.?

He noted that most people there practice open defecation and these may have contaminated the ponds and streams in the community.

?The situation is worsened by the heavy rainfall around this period which carries into the stream all the faeces and wastes and probably contaminating it,? he said.

?This place is a very hard area to reach as you can see on your way coming that the road is nothing to write home about.

?The community is a very large one and very well populated too. It has over 8,000 to 9,000 inhabitants.

?We have two polling units in this place. The thing is the only borehole we have is broken down and the other one is completely moribund.

?So, going by the genesis of this very incident, before the burial of the woman in question, the rains stopped for a very long time.

?After some time, the rains came again, and by the time it started again, there were already lots of defecation in the bushes.

?So the rains washed all those to the streams, and our people are making use of only stream and pond waters.

?Only people who have corrugated roofing make use of stream water but that was also not good at that time because the roofs were also very dirty during the early rains. So this triggered this outbreak.

?Right now we are helpless and we have lost so many souls in this struggle. People are dying ? men, women and children.?

A patient, Mrs Mary Nwakpu, said she started vomiting a day after the burial.

?I was so sick that I found it hard to walk. I was passing out stool regularly.

?They rushed me to the hospital in Iziogo where I was given drugs and I got better.

?I was later discharged and I am well now,? she said.

A youth leader in the community, Mr Moses Nwaebonyi, also re-echoed similar sentiment about the outbreak and lack of adequate social amenities in the community.

He said: ?The outbreak started when one woman died. After the burial of that woman, it escalated. We were suspecting that it is cholera but we have not had it before.

?The last time we had such a thing was when we were kids. So we didn?t know the symptoms.

?So after the burial, people that went there started having the symptoms and were dying.

?It killed about three persons on September 22 and continued spreading and killing more people. We have recorded many deaths and many are still in the hospital.?

A visit to some of the ponds revealed very dirty water covered in leaves and other debris floating on their tops, signifying that the water is very dirty and not fit for human consumption.

Another member of the community, Alfred Alagba, who served as guide to our reporter on the visit, insisted that the ponds are the main source of water for drinking and cooking in the area.

He said: ?You can see the kind of bad water we drink here. We don?t have good water to drink. This is the reason for the recent cholera outbreak which led to the death of many persons. We lost many persons because of it.

?We also don?t have good roads in this community. Neither do we have any hospital,? he further lamented. ?We don?t have a hospital or health centre. If we had one, the death from this recent outbreak wouldn?t have been this much, because the people infected would have been rushed there and they would have got adequate treatment on time.

?The nearest health centre is in the next town of Iziogo. You will pass about two villages before you get there. So it is very far.

?There is no access road to that place. So before you would manage to pass the difficult terrain to get there, the person might die.?

Anayo Odumodu, another resident of the community, explained that the ponds were man-made.

Pointing to heaps of sand around the pond, he said: ?We used to dig deep inside the ground and heap the sand which came from the pond around it to trap the water.?

He explained that this became necessary to ensure that enough water is available for the community during the dry season.

?When the rains stop, if you come here in the dry season, you will see that this large body of water will become very small and we will even be scraping it from the bottom.

?This is the water the whole village drinks. We don?t have a borehole, pipe born water or well. Both school children and adults in the community all come here to get water.

?We don?t have any other water source around this village. The pond is located in the centre of the village. It is where we get the water we use in cooking and also the one we drink.?

Odumodu called for provision of good source of drinking water for the community to prevent a reoccurrence of the outbreak.

He said: ?We are calling on government to come to our aid by giving us good water.

?We also don?t have good roads. You can see the sand heaped around the pond to show that it is man-made.

?We had to dig deep inside to ensure that enough water is stored here during rainy season so that during dry season we will still have water left to use.?

Government reacts

The Commissioner for Health in the state, Moses Ekuma, confirmed that 18 persons had died in the community as a result of the outbreak.

Ekuma, a medical doctor, also revealed that more than 50 persons from the area were hospitalised, treated and discharged.

He said infected persons were rushed to three hospitals in the area by the state government in collaboration with the local government and health partners.

The hospitals where the patients received treatment include Sudan United Mission Hospital, Onuenyim Agbaja; Sudan United Mission Hospital Izziogo and Izziogo Health Centre.

The Commissioner blamed the cholera outbreak on poor hygienic practices among the people.

He urged them to adopt good hygienic practices such as stopping open defecation, washing their hands regularly, covering their food and drinking clean water.

Mr Ekuma urged the people to report to the nearest hospital once they start having symptoms like diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration.

The Commissioner, while giving details of the outbreak, said 18 deaths had been recorded with a total of 80 infected persons across three local government areas of Izzi, Ebonyi and Abakaliki.

He said the Ministry got the information and quickly assembled a team of medical professionals in conjunction with World Health Organisation and UNICEF in the area.

He said: ?We provided enough drugs to treat infected persons. We also plan to open a health centre in the affected community for easy access so as to curtail the outbreak, and we have made available cars and motorcycles for easy evacuation of suspected infected persons to the hospital.?

Chairman of the council, Stephen Nwankpa, thanked the state government for its swift response, which he noted saved the lives of many infected persons. He directed the provision of a borehole in the community within one month to ensure that the issue of drinking contaminated water is stopped.

According to him, other issues such as access roads and schools will be looked into by both the local and state governments soon.

The Commissioner for Water Resources, Chinedu Nkah, said the state government has revitalised the Ebonyi State Rural Water and Sanitation Agency.

Nkah, who spoke to The Nation in Abakaliki, said this is aimed at ensuring that communities in the hinterlands are provided with clean drinking water through boreholes.

He said the state government is partnering with the federal government through the Partnership for Expanded Water, Sanitation and Hygiene to provide boreholes for the rural areas.

?So we collaborate with this agency to build boreholes and we have completed 49 boreholes. We selected critical communities in Izzi, Ikwo, Ohaukwu, Afikpo, and we are going to do more.

?I went to these communities and saw the source of water and it is not something to write home about.

?We are also going to build toilets because open defecation is another source of cholera outbreak. When rain falls, it washes everything into the streams. So we are working on it.?

Nkah called for partnership with local governments in the state to revitalise and repair damaged boreholes.

?For the old boreholes, over 98 per cent of them are damaged. We are talking to ALGON so that we can partner to repair them.

?Why would the local government and the communities not join hands with the stage government in this area??

?Some of these issues will not cost more than N100,000 to repair. So the local governments can provide funding while we provide the manpower from our ministry to go and repair them.

?They must not leave everything for the state government,? he said.

Meanwhile, as Ebonyi State government continues to battle the outbreak of cholera, Reals Pharmaceutical Limited has donated its innovative Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS) drug, Electrorush to the state government.

The company said It made the donation as part of its corporate social responsibility, adding that it will aid in management of infected persons. (The Nation)

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