Cholera epidemic said to infect 7,000 people in northern Iraq

BAGHDAD - A cholera epidemic in northern Iraq has infected approximately 7,000 people and could reach Baghdad within weeks as the disease spreads through the country's decrepit and unsanitary water system, Iraqi health officials said yesterday.

The World Health Organization reported that the epidemic is concentrated in the northern regions of Kirkuk and Sulaimaniya and that 10 people are known to have died. But Dr. Said Hakki, president of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, a relief organization that has responded to the epidemic, said that new cases had turned up in the neighboring provinces, Erbil and Nineweh, indicating that the disease had spread.

Most significant, Hakki said, were two cases in a village on the border between Kirkuk and Diyala provinces, one involving a young girl. Baghdad is next to Diyala.

Because of that geographic spread, Hakki said, health officials at the Red Crescent estimate that cases will begin turning up in Baghdad in late September or early October, when temperatures are especially favorable for the growth of the bacteria Vibrio cholerae, which causes the disease by infecting the intestine.

Dr. Cerko Abdulla, chief of the Sulaimaniya health directorate, also said that the epidemic had begun spreading in adjacent provinces. "The water system represents the main problem," he said. "The disease can spread widely through water, and that's a very serious matter."

In Baghdad, Iraq's deputy health minister, Dr. Adel Mohsin, said that he was not aware of any cases on the Diyala border. But he said that further spread of the epidemic was "very likely" unless government agencies followed strict guidelines on water testing and maintaining sufficient levels of chlorination.

Mohsin said that chlorine imports had been severely curtailed as a result of recent insurgent bombs that had been laced with chlorine, which in concentrated form can be deadly.