Minister of Health and Medical Prevention Issa Mbaye Samb of Senegal

But the incident took on a different hue when the Senegalese press reported a few days later that the country's sport minister Issa Mbaye Samb had suffered a nervous breakdown after his imperious President Abdoulaye Wade demanded to know why the national soccer team had done so badly.

Senegals Health Minister Issa Mbaye Samb was marking the occasion by going to the western Thies region to take part in the launch of an awareness and prevention campaign, but his country has already managed to bring the death rate down to between one and two percent of the 1,129,000 registered cases, a third of what it was in 1990.

Senegalese Health Minister Issa Mbaye Samb says that stocks of cholera medicine in other regions of Senegal are being made available as pilgrims return home and fall ill.

Mbaye Samb says that health workers are continuing to warn returning pilgrims in different regions about the symptoms of cholera, because often people only go to the hospital when it is too late.