Kogi state government has set machinery in motion to investigate and trace the dead people to the graveyard to ascertain the actual number of those that died as a result of the epidemic in Yagba West local government area. Th e Commissioner for Health, Dr Saka Audu, who disclosed this at a press conference in Lokoja, dispelled the rumour that 62 people were killed by the alleged strange ailment in the Council, saying it was the initial information given by the Fulani leaders in the villages. Audu further disclosed that the epidemic started six weeks ago at Okunran, Okoloke and IsanluEsa all in Yagba West.
According to him, the disease was not a case of Lassa fever as laboratory tests carried out on the patients by medical experts drafted to the community proved negative. He further said out of the 39 patients evacuated from the villages to the Specialists Hospital in Lokoja, it was only six that were admitted as a result of vomiting and stooling, adding that the patients were responding to treatment.
“Th e state government has decided to carry out the idealfi ndings, so that we can come up with the actual fi gure of deaths. We will investigate and trace the dead people to the graveyard and come up with the correct fi gure. “We want to assure the general public that government is doing all that is humanly possible to stay on top of the situation. We will continue to inform the public as the investigation progresses,” he said.
Also speaking, the state’s Epidemiologist, Dr Francis Akpa, said the information they got from their disease surveillance system was that one of the three patients brought to ECWA hospital in Egbe, was suspected to have Lassa fever, but when samples were taken to Irua Hospital in Edo state, the result was negative. He said the claim by the Fulani leaders in the villages about the death toll cannot be taken to be correct until the medical personnel in the state carry out the empirical assessment to have a conclusive proof and fi gure of the number of deaths recorded.
Meanwhile, when our correspondent visited the Kogi state Specialists Hospital yesterday, some the aff ected Fulani patients were in admission responding to treatment drastically. A parent of one of the patients who said he lost his four years son as a result of illness, Malam Abubakar Burutu, told newsmen that he was not sure of the numbers but admitted that some Fulani camps lost three or three persons. He noted that the infection actually started two months ago, but due to lack of medical facilities in their domain, many of the suff erers died.
Burutu, however, appealed to the state government to provide potable water, saying their drinking water sources were unhygienic.
