Strife lets river blindness regain ground in Africa

YAOUNDE - Seven years after the World Health Organisation heralded the virtual elimination of river blindness from West Africa, the debilitating disease is regaining ground in several countries due to civil conflict.

"The disease is re-invading some regions where it was thought to have been eradicated," Marcelline Ntep, head of Cameroon's river blindness programme, told Reuters.

She said many of those countries "have been plunged into prolonged civil strife and armed conflicts, thereby interrupting the distribution process and preventing the drug from reaching affected persons in some remote areas."

She cited Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Sudan and the Great Lakes region as areas where the disease had returned.

It is a major problem in 30 African countries, she added.

Partners in the fight against the disease, also known as Onchocerciasis, are due to meet in Cameroon's capital Yaounde on September 26 to 27 to discuss strategies and funding.

"River blindness is a major public health problem in Cameroon. It is found in all the 10 provinces in the country, with 10 million people, of an estimated population of 17 million, exposed to it," Ntep said.

The disease was responsible for a third of the blind people in the central African country, or some 30,000 people, she said.

The World Health Organisation estimates some 17.7 million people are affected by river blindness, about 90 per cent of them in Africa.

In 1974, the international community began the fight against the disease in 11 countries in West Africa, its original home.

The campaign targeted the riverside breeding zones of the black fly, which spreads the wormlike parasites responsible for the disease. It considerably reduced the impact of river blindness in the region by the time it ended in 2002.

In 1995, the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control (Apoc) was launched to cover a further 19 countries, including Cameroon. The programme is due to expire in 2010.

This project used Mectizan, a drug freely provided by American pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co, which does not kill the adult parasites but relieves the agonising itching associated with the disease and halts the progress toward blindness. Around the world, river blindness has an enormous economic impact, preventing people from working, harvesting crops, receiving an education, or caring for children.

Fertile banks of swiftly flowing rivers teem with black flies whose bites insert a microscopic parasitic worm into victims. Millions of the worm's offspring swarm through the body, especially the skin and eyes, eventually causing blindness.

There is currently no safe drug available to cure the disease fully, but there is reason for hope.

According to a report in April, scientists at the University of Liverpool believe they are close to finding a treatment after discovering some African cattle have natural immunity to a parasite similar to the one which causes river blindness.

- REUTERS