U.N. to Burn Bodies as Cholera Spreads

The still-worsening cholera epidemic that has ravaged Rwandan refugees here has killed up to 14,000 people in less than a week, officials said Monday, and mass graves are now so full that the United Nations plans to start burning the bodies this week.

Ray Wilkinson, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said that long burial trenches dug by French army troops are virtually full. He said the Zairian government has given approval for incineration of the hundreds of corpses of men, women and children that appear by the roads and in the refugee camps each day.

He said the French--who buried about 2,000 bodies on Monday alone--have agreed to provide fuel to burn the dead, but no agency or government had yet agreed to take on the grisly job.

Meantime, six relatively small mass graves will be dug in a Zairian national park near the Kabumba refugee camp, where hundreds of uncollected corpses surround a field hospital and have been stacked on a small hill.

Burying the highly contagious corpses has been a major problem for relief agencies struggling to cope with the demands of an estimated 1.2 million refugees who began flooding across the border nearly two weeks ago. The ground is mostly solid, volcanic rock that is impossible to dig by hand.

Georges D’Alemagne of Doctors Without Borders told reporters that the 6-day-old epidemic “is still worsening,” and each day brings more deaths than the day before. He said about 80,000 to 100,000 refugees are now expected to contract the bacterial disease; up to half may die.

He said that doctors now fear the deadly epidemic of Ogawa cholera, the most common strain of the disease, may spread into eastern Zaire, putting about 6 million people at risk. “This is a cholera-endemic area,” he said.

Isabelle Pardieu, another physician with Doctors Without Borders, said the “relative death toll” had fallen from 50% to 21% over the last three days. In other words, although far more people have now been stricken by the disease, a greater percentage are surviving as more medical aid and clean water supplies reach the area.

Up to 30 humanitarian flights arrived at Goma on Monday, including two U.S. Air Force C-141s carrying 42 tons of oral rehydration salts for cholera victims. Another U.S. relief flight, carrying two water purification units, was postponed until today because of mechanical problems. Each unit can provide 600 gallons of clean water an hour, said Maj. Guy Shields, U.S. military spokesman here.

Other aid that arrived Monday included eight planes from Israel carrying a 120-bed emergency hospital and operating theater.