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Reuters
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At least 50 hippopotams and other large animals were killed by anthrax poisoning in the National Park of the Democratic Republic of the East of Congo and were spotted floating along a large river which feeds one of the great African lakes, the chief of the park announced on Tuesday.
The tests confirmed the anthrax poisoning, said the director of the Virunga park, Emmanuel de Merode, adding that Buffalo had also been killed. The exact cause of poisoning was not yet clear.
The images shared by the park show the hippopotamus immobile on the side and the back in the Ishasha river, or captured among the foliage on the muddy banks of the river.
Deaths represent a major loss for the park, which has worked to increase the number of hippopotams in recent decades after poaching and war have reduced the population by more than 20,000 to a few hundred by 2006. The park now contains around 1,200 hippopotams.
The park guards noticed that there was a problem when the dead animals began to appear about five days ago along the river, which forms the border of the Congo with Uganda and crosses an area under the control of the rebel fighters.
Anthrax is a serious disease generally caused by bacteria found naturally in the soil. Wild animals can be infected if they inhale anthrax spores in contaminated soils, plants or water.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation warned residents to avoid fauna in the region and boil local sources before drinking.
De Merode said that a team was there and that it was trying to get the hippopotams out of the water and bury them, but that it was difficult because they had no excavators.
“It’s difficult due to the lack of access and logistics,” Merode told Reuters. “We have the means to limit the propagation (of the disease) by burying them with caustic soda.”
The river flows north to Lake Edward, where the inhabitants spotted more corpses.
“There are more than 25 bodies of Hippopotamus floating in the waters of the lake, from Kagezi to Nyakakoma,” the chief of civil society in Nyakakoma told Reuters.
Virunga is a large expanse of deep forests, glaciers and volcanoes, with more species of birds, reptiles and mammals than any other protected area in the world.
It was taken in the middle of the militia activity since the civil wars fought at the turn of the century.
