Wish there were more pleasant ways to bone up on my geography.

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/093/world/Toll_in_outbreak_tops_1_000_in:.shtml

Toll in outbreak tops 1,000 in Burkina Faso

By Brahima Ouadraego, Associated Press, 4/3/2001 15:21

OUGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) The death toll in a meningitis outbreak in Burkina Faso topped 1,000 Tuesday, but the government claimed it was making inroads against the epidemic.

In the neighboring West African nation of Niger, authorities said the disease had claimed at least 169 lives since early March.

The World Health Organization announced Tuesday that another 1 million doses of vaccines had arrived in Burkina Faso, in addition to the 2.5 million already used against the 3-month-old outbreak here. The country has 11 million people.

Burkina Faso's government has come under bitter criticism from its public, with people lining up at daily at government-designated vaccination posts, only to be told the vaccines have run out.

Separate epidemics are hitting Benin, Chad and Ethiopia.

Meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain and spinal cord, often surfaces in Africa during annual dry seasons. Meningitis epidemics frequently rage across the center of the continent, from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east.

A 1996 outbreak in Burkina Faso killed 4,363 people out of 42,967 cases.

This year's outbreak in Burkina Faso has been particularly lethal with 1,059 deaths among 7,377 cases since early January, health officials said Tuesday.

The death rate, however, has fallen from 18 percent in mid-March to 10 percent, the government said. Mathias Some, Health Ministry secretary-general, credited close monitoring of the outbreak, the vaccination campaign and free treatment.

-- Anonymous, April 03, 2001

Answers

Burkina Faso used to be Upper Volta, not that it was widely known under that name. It's in West Africa, though not one of the West African coastal states. A small country, it is located north of the Ivory Coast.

-- Anonymous, April 03, 2001

Odd. We had in the Tampa Bay area something like 5 cases in the last few months. All High school kids.

-- Anonymous, April 03, 2001

You know where these places are if you used to or still collect stamps. Upper Volta and Chad had neat stamps--boosted their economies.

-- Anonymous, April 03, 2001

Speaking of stamp collecting, I suspect Tana Tuva (sp?) was the most dependent on collectors for its government revenue. The tiny country (now absorbed I believe by Mongolia) used to lure collectors by unusual shapes for its stamps - diamonds, parallelograms etc.

-- Anonymous, April 04, 2001