Mystery illness kills 21 miners in Congo diamond town
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A mysterious illness sweeping through a remote town at the centre of a diamond rush in Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more than 20 miners and infected nearly 1,000, a U.N. aid worker said on Wednesday.
U.N. agencies, aid workers and government health officials are making their way to Libayakuyasuka, some 84 km (52 miles) northeast of Punia, a town in the north of Maniema province, where 10,000 miners are digging in a new mine.
“There have been 21 deaths and there are over 970 cases amongst the miners,” Gerson Brandao Azevedo, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told Reuters by phone from Kindu, the capital of Maniema.
“We suspect that this is a pulmonary infection caused by people working in terrible conditions in the diamond rush. The World Health Organisation and some aid agencies are trying to help but the situation is not yet under control,” he added.
Brandao Azevedo said the infection was not contagious but he put the deaths and the large number of infections down to thousands of miners searching for diamonds in the bush without proper equipment or healthcare.
The diamond rush began several months ago but the first recorded case of a miner falling ill was on July 25, he added.
There are hundreds of thousands of small-scale miners in Congo, a country rich in natural resources but torn apart by years of war and chaos.
Congo’s last war officially ended two years ago but the central government has not yet stamped its authority on much of the east, where armed groups still roam and thousands continue to die every month, mostly from war-related hunger and disease.
An outbreak of plague in a diamond-mining town in a neighbouring province killed at least 61 miners and infected 400 people in February.
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