Aid Workers Battle Cholera in Northern Uganda

Aid workers are battling a cholera outbreak that has killed three people and infected at least 79 others in a camp for displaced persons in northern Uganda, the United Nations said on Monday.

The outbreak means more suffering for an estimated 1.8 million people who have been driven from their homes in the region by a Ugandan sect’s long reign of terror.The Lord’s Resistance Army, a religious sect led by self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, has been terrorizing northern Uganda for nearly a decade, kidnapping children and taking them to camps across the border in southern Sudan where they are forced to become fighters and sex slaves.Medical officials believe as many as 800 residents of the Pabbo camp, about 12 miles north of the town of Gulu, are carrying cholera without symptoms and could inadvertently help it spread to neighboring villages, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.The private relief agency Doctors Without Borders has opened a center at the camp to treat all new cholera cases, and U.N. and private agencies are working to clean up the likely sources of contamination, latrines built near water sources, the U.N. office said. (Source: Reuters, Nov 2004)