An outbreak of the haemorrhagic disease Rift Valley Fever is now estimated to have killed more than 400 hundred people in north-eastern Kenya and in Somalia.

BBC East Africa Correspondent Martin Dawes: "little is known about how far it has spread" (3'20'')

The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN has categorised the outbreak as an international disaster because of fears that infected mosquitos and animals may spread the disease to other countries. The BBC's East Africa correspondent Martin Dawes has just returned from the affected area in north-eastern Kenya:

Hassan Mohammed contracted the disease from stricken livestock

It took Hassan Mohammed twenty days to walk through the flooded countryside to the regional centre of Garissa. He left a village on the Somali border where five people and many animals had died.

As he lay on a hospital bed he told the Red Cross doctor that he was suffering from headaches and bleeding from the gums. He had eaten sick animals -- there was no other food, he said.

The doctor believes he has Rift Valley Fever.

Correspondent Martin Dawes joins doctors on their rounds

At this stage of the infection, she reckons 50% of the patients die.

In the course of the morning she went to see three other patients in the town. All exhibit the classic symptoms and blood samples were taken for testing in Nairobi, America and South Africa.

So many have symptoms of bleeding that she believes they may be facing a more virulent strain of the virus. But very few children are thought to have been affected and she's puzzled by the nature and spread of the epidemic.

There is very little information as to what is happening throughout the remote region. The floods have made communication with some places impossible.

Displaced in dangerously close proximity to animals due to floods

It has also drawn displaced persons and animals together in what now must be seen as a hazardous proximity. Near the town is a displaced persons camp of five thousand people.

Their goats wander through the makeshift shelters. An animal which had just aborted ate grass where a child played.

18 year-old Hubah Ahmed still complains of body pains, but she is recovering from the disease. Her seven-month-old baby boy died within a day of showing the first symptoms.
 

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