Seven people died on Sunday in a village in central Ivory Coast near Bouaké, where fifty-nine others were hospitalized for an illness of still unknown cause, hospital sources told AFP on Monday.
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Seven people died, five at Bouaké University Hospital and two in Niangban, a village about thirty kilometers south, a hospital source said.
“We have a total of 59 (people) in the Bouaké University Hospital, “mainly children and some adolescents,” this source added, indicating that the symptoms of the disease were “vomiting” and “diarrhea.”
“The deceased” were between 5 and 12 years old, confirmed Niangban village chief Emmanuel Kouamé N’Guessan.
He reported that “around fifty people” were “at the Bouaké University Hospital.”
On Sunday, a nurse told him that children were “dying,” he said.
A close friend of the chef, Célestin Kouadio Koffi, stated that corn porridge was rumored to be the cause of the contamination.
Zitanick Amoin Yao, the mother of the first victim, said she bought porridge which she gave to her son. After feeling the urge to go to the toilet, she said: “He started vomiting when I gave him the medicine they gave me at Djébonouan hospital.” “We went back to the hospital and they said us, we should go to the Bouaké University Hospital where he died at the age of three,” she said.
Agnès Aya Konan also lost her daughter. She refuses to blame the seller, but says her children ate the same porridge on Sunday.
In February, in the village of Kpo-Kahankro, also near Bouaké, two people were sentenced to five years in prison for being infected with Clostridium, a bacteria that an official report said had caused 16 deaths and 21 according to villagers.