News

Harare sitting on health time bomb

October 04, 2008 Edition 1

Stanley Gama

Zimbabwe's capital is sitting on a cholera time bomb as the deadly disease, which has reportedly claimed the lives of more that 20 people in Harare's satellite town of Chitungwiza over the last few weeks, is spreading fast due to lack of resources to counter it.

Zimbabweans fleeing into South Africa from a still-crumbling economy could be carrying the highly infectious disease with them.

The Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights says the outbreak of cholera, which spreads because of unhygienic conditions, could turn out to be a huge disaster if the government does not move to stop its spread immediately.

Because of the collapse of services across the country, raw sewage is flowing in the densely populated residential areas. The local authorities have also failed to collect and dispose of rubbish - fuelling the spread of the disease.

And the Harare City Council, which supplies Chitungwiza, has reportedly not been adequately treating drinking water, further contributing to the spread of cholera.

Health Minister David Parirenyatwa admitted to the state-owned Herald newspaper last week that cholera had reached alarming levels and something needed to be done to control it. He said his ministry had recorded 16 deaths from cholera but Weekend Argus understands from medical sources that the death toll could be far more than 20.

"The disease is spreading fast and more people could be dying on a daily basis. It is frightening and we call upon the government to provide people with clean water and repair sanitary facilities," a doctor who preferred not to be named said.

"People must have access to clean drinking water while sewage, which is flowing in almost every high-density area of Harare, must be stopped. It must be the government's responsibility to make sure people should not get anywhere near raw sewage.

"We suspect that more people may have succumbed to the disease than what we are being told officially because we hear of many funerals everyday in Chitungwiza," said the doctor.

In the worst-affected areas of Chitungwiza, residents have gone for more than six months without running water. A lack of medicine in hospitals is aggravating the problem, with patients being ordered to look for medicines in pharmacies, which are all also mostly empty.

In the rare cases when medicine is available, it is unaffordable.

Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights last week castigated the government for failing to control cholera. "The ongoing deaths, which are a result of official and criminal negligence, have brought despair to the affected families and communities and the nation at large," it said in a statement

"It is alarming and quite unusual for such a preventable disease to continue to claim such valuable lives in this day and age. If more than a dozen people have died from cholera in just less than a month, we can only imagine how many more are currently affected by, or at risk of contracting, this avoidable disease.

"These wanton deaths are intolerable and shameful, and the state's failure is merely a replication of other high-level failures, where the citizenry has now been disenfranchised of almost all their basic human rights," it said. - Independent Foreign Service

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