A cholera outbreak is looming in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, a health ministry official warned yesterday. "We are on the verge of a cholera epidemic in Maputo," Mr Jose Chi vale, a ministry of health epidemiologist, told a regular daily meeting of aid workers. He said that cholera cases had risen from a previous six a week to 23 a week.
He indicated that his ministry was experiencing problems airlifting medicines to areas affected by floodwaters, especially oxygen, which could not be transported on normal flights. The floods had also dislodged and moved landmines, posing a new threat to lives once the water subsides, the Foreign Minister, Mr Leonardo Simao, said in Pretoria, South Africa. "We knew the location of most of them [the mines] until recently. To day we don't know where these landmines are," he told reporters after a meeting of ministers from Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe to respond to the devastating floods.
Mozambique is still littered with land mines buried during its 16-year civil war which ended in 1992. In June, officials of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community said there were still 1.9 million landmines buried in the country.
Meanwhile, tropical cyclone Gloria, which is heading towards Mozambique, has weakened over Madagascar but could pick up steam when it crosses the channel, the South African Weather Bureau has said. "Gloria has weakened during her overland track and may be expected to show some reintensification as she enters the Mozambique channel," it said in a statement. It is expected to cross into the eastern Mozambique channel late today, the bureau added.
The brutal power of Cyclone Eline, which hit Mozambique last week, has been blamed on the exceptionally warm Indian Ocean and surface temperatures on the Mozambican channel. Eline exacerbated floods caused by heavy rain in the past three weeks.