Epidemic fears as horn of Africa flooded and homes destroyed

Torrential rains and floods have hit up to 1.8 million people in the Horn of Africa, driving tens of thousands from their homes and threatening to trigger epidemics, UN aid bodies warned yesterday.

In the latest reports of growing disaster around the region, the UNHCR refugee agency said rising waters had uprooted more than 78,000 people in northeast Kenya and completely cut off three refugee camps near Kenya’s border with Somalia.

Heavy rains are forecast to continue into at least December, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

Roads and bridges have been washed away, and homes destroyed, especially in Somalia, it said in a statement.

“Accumulated estimates from the three countries put the total number of affected people between 1.5 million and 1.8 million,” OCHA spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told a news briefing in Geneva.

Helicopters were urgently needed to reach isolated villages under water in Somalia, where relief operations are hampered by conflict, she said.

Epidemics linked to polluted, stagnant water — including cholera, malaria and dysentery — are feared, so products to treat water and mosquito nets are urgently needed, Byrs said.

A dam on the river Tana in Kenya was “about to burst” and authorities were trying to warn the population. A breach must be opened to keep the dam, south of the town of Garissa, from collapsing.

Kenya’s health ministry has reported 13 cholera cases and two deaths, she said.

The UNHCR refugee agency will fly emergency fuel, medicines and plastic sheets to Dadaab tomorrow, where some 160,000 mostly Somali refugees are sheltering in low-lying settlements after fleeing growing tensions in their homeland.

At least 47 people have died in floods in southern Somalia described as the worst for 50 years, and one charity said up to half a million children there needed emergency aid.