Northern Barh El-Ghazal state, South Sudan
January 9, 2022 — The Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries has announced that citizens in Northern Bahr el Ghazal State can now resume eating fish from the Lol River.
This comes after experts finalized an investigation of a strange disease affecting fish in the area.
In December 2021, fishermen at the Lol River reported an unknown diseases after they discovered wounds on the bodies of the fish fetched.
This prompted the authorities to ban fishing in the river and its tributaries and also urged citizens to abstain from eating such fishes.
On 20th of December last year, the Ministry and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization then sent a team of experts to Aweil to find out the cause of the fish infection.
In the joint technical committee report of health professionals released today, the diagnostic investigations diagnosed the disease as Epizootic Ulcerative Syndrome or EUS, a fungal infection with a life cycle of less than 20 days.
The report says that the lifespan of the infection has now finished and the fish is now safe for consumption.
Speaking to Journalists on Thursday, Onyoti Adigo Nyikwec, the Minister of Livestock and Fisheries says the disease does not pose a direct health risk to secondary consumers adding that locals there can now resume fishing activities.
“It is a fungal disease, it does not poses direct health risk, but infection resulting from eating the fish alteration will have health complication to humans consuming such fish”,Minister Nyikwec explains to journalists on Thursday.
“I therefore declare that the state government of Northern Bahr El Ghazal has to lift the ban on fishing activities along the Lou River for our people to go along with their normal livelihood and food security activities.” he said.
According to the report,the disease first reported at Gangura River of Western Equatoria State in March 2020.
The Gangura River, which connects to Lol River has its tributaries from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The health experts suspects that the two outbreaks in the country must have originated from the tropical rain-forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In a statement seen by Nyamilepedia, EUS disease was also reported in Japan in 1971 and in Botswana, Namibia, and Zambia in 2007.
