This is dramatic news. Since mid-March, several cases of cholera, 58 in total, have been detected in Mayotte and on Wednesday May 8, 2024, this contamination caused the first death. A three-year-old child lost his life as revealed in a joint press release by the prefecture and the Regional Health Agency: “A first child died today. The child lived in the Koungou district where several cases of cholera had been identified in recent weeks.” Liot MP from Mayotte Estelle Youssouffa spoke to RTL on Thursday May 9, 2024 to add details on this tragedy affecting the city. “He is a child who lived in the slums of Koungou. It is often Comorians who live in these slums. This death of a child reminds us that cholera is a fatal disease which is taking root in a French department which is medical desert” she explains before recalling that Mayotte has only one hospital and five emergency doctors for around 321,000 inhabitants.
An ongoing vaccination campaign
She then goes on to explain that living in difficult living conditions with limited access to water is a “explosive cocktail for a deadly disease”. Information confirmed by epidemiologist Antoine Flahault who spoke on France 24, these precarious living conditions are conducive to the development of the disease. As a reminder, cholera is a bacterial disease which can initially cause acute diarrhea and, worst of all, cause death from dehydration within one to three days.
It is caused by the absorption of food or water contaminated by a bacteria, the bacillus vibrio cholerae or cholera vibrio. “The precarious housing of migrants arriving in Mayotte, in search of subsistence from the neighboring Comoros, favors the spread of cholera which is a disease of underdevelopment and extreme poverty”. A vaccination campaign is underway to try to contain as best as possible the epidemic which has almost disappeared in mainland France since the beginning of the 2000s, on average zero to two cases have been recorded per year.