ROANOKE TIMES 

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

DATE: FRIDAY, July 22, 1994                   TAG: 9407220122
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: GOMA, ZAIRE                                LENGTH: Medium

CHOLERA ATTACKS, KILLS REFUGEES

The Rwandans who fled fighting in their homeland are under attack from a deadly foe that rose up in their refugee camps - cholera that relief workers say is killing the refugees faster than they can be counted.

In Munigi, one of the several refugee camps around Goma, where more than 1 million refugees are huddled, cold statistics told of the disease's hot lethality.

There was one cholera case on Tuesday. By Thursday, 250 people were dead.

``We had maybe 10 cases reported yesterday, dozens overnight, today hundreds, and it will continue,'' Isabelle Pardieu of Doctors Without Borders said.

The ferocious disease is the latest horror to attack refugees weakened by exhaustion, malnutrition and terror.

``They're dying from dysentery, dehydration, exhaustion, and now cholera,'' said Pardieu's colleague, Koenraad Henckaerts.

The humanitarian agency said its doctors reported 800 dead before they stopped counting the bodies Thursday on a five-mile stretch of road from Goma to the Munigi camp.

Cholera most commonly spreads through water contaminated by excrement. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said Thursday that it needs governments to help build 60,000 latrines and provide clean water to try to get the epidemic under control.

In the meantime, the deteriorating conditions have driven many refugees into despairing passivity.

``What do you mean I must make sure to boil the water?'' Dafrose Kabutumwa asked incredulously of a reporter. ``Can't you see we're all going to die here anyway?''

Others have been pushed to the edge.

A crazed woman gyrated naked down the middle of the road leading from town to Goma airport on Thursday, shouting expletives at the apathetic crowds of refugees and continuing when she stopped in front of 11 bodies wrapped in mats.

One man unloading corpses at a mass grave threw his head back and laughed heartily when he managed to chuck the body of a young boy directly into the middle of a pit.

The Clinton administration stepped up its role Thursday in aiding the refugees, including increased airlifts of supplies to combat the cholera. 


 by CNB