
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 19, 1991                   TAG: 9104190136
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LIMA, PERU                                LENGTH: Medium

CHOLERA EPIDEMIC RESURGES

Efrain Porras lay on the floor of a crowded shantytown clinic, his face twisted with pain. An intravenous tube fed serum into his arm. A bedpan lay by his side.

Porras said he was unsure how he contracted cholera. Maybe it was the untreated water he mixed with his drink or maybe it was the raw fish he ate.

"Of course, I heard all the warnings," said Porras, who lives in a mud-brick house in the shantytown of Marquez. "But after a while I just wanted to live a normal life."

The epidemic that has killed more than 1,000 Peruvians continues to spread rapidly, health officials say.

Although the death rate fell dramatically in response to newspaper and television health warnings, it has soared again. Many recent victims, doctors say, simply got tired of almost three months of boiling their drinking water and not eating their usual foods.

"It's the same thing that has happened with AIDS," said Dr. Patrick Reycru, a member of a French relief team. "People are willing to take a chance in exchange for a little gratification."

Many doctors thought cholera would be limited to the coastal cities where it broke out in January.

By Feb. 24, only three people a day were dying from cholera, down from a daily average of eight earlier in the month.

But the disease spread up into Peru's impoverished Andean mountains, where doctors are often days away by foot and only one in five people drinks treated water.

By early March, the death toll had jumped back to 10 people a day. Now, the figure is more than 20 deaths a day and the epidemic has spread to Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil and Chile.

by CNB