Disease outbreak

Residents crowd pharmacies for masks and antibiotics to stave off outbreak

Panic in Madagascar as plague spreads.

ANTANANARIVO: Crowds of fearful residents flocked to their local pharmacies before dawn, desperate to buy masks and antibiotics to stave off a plague outbreak sweeping Madagascar.

In just the past few days, the highly infectious disease has wreaked havoc in the poor Indian Ocean island nation, claiming six lives in the capital city Antananarivo and causing widespread panic.

Like many of his neighbours, 50-year-old Johannes Herinjatovo quickly became overwhelmed by fear as news of the outbreak spread.

He, too, joined the long lines forming outside the capital’s chemists.

“I’d already visited six this morning and they told me that they didn’t have any more masks,” he said as he left a pharmacy empty-handed.

His wife Miora Herinjatovo, 55, had better luck, successfully locat- ing a mask in a hospital.

“Everyone is looking for one,” she said. “Some pharmacies are saying that there won’t be any more in the city. Others are telling us to wait.”

Having failed to get hold of a mask, her husband instead collected a handful of generic antibiotics.

The health ministry has advised against using the treatment preventively against the plague, but that has done little to deter worried members of the public.

Prime Minister Olivier Mahafaly Solonandrasana dropped a bombshell on national TV on Saturday when he announced that 24 people have so far died from the plague since the end of August.

Madagascar is in the grip of a double plague: both bubonic plague, which is spread by infected rats via flea bites, and pneumonic plague, spread person-to-person.

Pneumonic plague can kill within 18-24 hours of infection if left untreated, but common antibiotics can cure it if given early on.

Madagascar has suffered plague almost every year since 1980, often sparked by rats fleeing forest fires.

But the current outbreak has affected large urban areas, increasing the risk of transmission, according to the World Health Organisation. — AFP

Desperate measures: An officer (above) from the Health Ministry setting rat traps as a measure against the plague in a primary school in Andraisoro while (right) people queue outside a pharmacy for medication and face masks in downtown Antananarivo. —...