Govt unsure if village deaths due to El Nino

 THE Health Department says it does not know if the reported deaths that occurred in villages around the country are related to the El Nino weather syndrome.  

Surveillance and emergency programme manager Berry Ropa said on Friday that this was because many of those deaths occurred in the villages and not in hospitals or health centres.

“So the Health Department is not sure whether people died during the El Nino period or earlier,” he said.

“We have no count of what they actually died of even though we know that there were food shortages and there was no water in the villages.

 “They could have died in association with the drought but because most of these deaths occurred in the village, we cannot say the cause of death.”