Alarm as dreaded Cowid-22 steadily rears ugly head in Kenya
Mambo Matata
Even before Kenyans agree on whether coronavirus is real or a scam of the century, another zoonotic disease, which is threatening to turn into a devastating pandemic, has been reported in the country.
The disease, which infectious disease experts have named as foot-in-mouth or Cowid-22 or, is believed to have jumped from cows, because it has a striking resemblance to the foot and mouth disease which affects the bovines.
Like Covid-19, Cowid-22 is highly infectious and has no known cure. Some countries are, however, understood to have found a cure, but Kenya is reluctant to import it, insisting on a home-grown solution to the disease.
Medical experts say the disease is a new strain of a similar group of diseases which have been sweeping through the country every five years, often leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.
Serious symptoms
The symptoms include patients oozing foul words from the mouth, drooling, a loose tongue and the tendency to put the foot in the mouth every time they speak in public.
“It spreads through airwaves, the Internet, public rallies and face-to-face meetings, which makes it extremely hard to control,” said a doctor who did not want to be named for fear of being branded an alarmist.
The virus was first reported among a breed that considers itself the Friesian of the human race – the politicians.
Some of the politicians who have exhibited serious symptoms of the disease have been briefly quarantined and released.
They are now out and about, spreading the virus with abandon.
Others who have tested positive for the dangerous virus are Cabinet Secretaries, bloggers and other cyber warriors.
Attempts to speak to the supposed Patient Zero, who ironically goes by the name Juu Hana Neno (he is blameless), were met with a torrent of drool and denials.
“Oooolisikiawapi niko na Cowid-22? Mama yako ndiye ako na hiyo ugonjwa,” he retorted. (Who says I have the disease? Your mother is the one who is infected).
Cases of community transmission have also been reported with many members of the public beginning to show symptoms.
“What do you expect? As we have known all along, when politicians sneeze, Wanjiku catches a cold,!” said another doctor who is involved in the research on the disease.
Like in the case of coronavirus, a huge controversy has broken out about the origin of the disease, with two camps pointing fingers at each other.
The rivals are accusing each other of a conspiracy to create and spread the foot-in-mouth disease with the intention of finishing their opponents.
“Hawa ng’ombe wanaotanga tanga kila mahali ndio wameleta hii ugonjwa kutumaliza,” (The cows that keep loitering all over the country conspired to bring the virus to finish us), a politician, frothing in the mouth, told the media.
In a swift rejoinder, a rival politician shot back: “This disease was created by the deep State and the system with the intention of stealing our milk in 2022. But waelewe kwamba (they should understand that) we are immune to such conspiracies.”
Others have vehemently denied the existence of the disease, dismissing it as a hoax being used by the system to force its opponents into quarantine and to cover up its sins.
Even as the political pandemics control body, popularly known as the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, warned that Cowid-22 had the potential of snowballing into a pandemic of the 2007/8 proportions, it admitted that it was helpless in the face of the outbreak.
“We have no cure for the disease. All we can do is quarantine the patients for a while, administer pain killers and allow them to go back home,” said an NCIS commissioner, wringing his hands in obvious powerlessness.
A critic cited the commission’s lack of spine for its failure to find a lasting cure for the Cowid-22 disease and related political pandemics.
“The only thing the commission can cure is the politicians’ hurt feelings by licking their wounded pride,” observed the critic, adding that the body was a criminal waste of the taxpayer’s hard-earned money. – [email protected]
