The ministry’s weekly surveillance report blamed municipalities inability to provide safe drinking water to residents. Ministry of Health and Child Care, Portia Manangazira, said poor water supplies was the major cause of typhoid.
"We have been barking for a long time now that water be supplied to people if we are to combat typhoid, but it seems decisions haven't been made to improve people's lives.
"The moment adequate water isn't supplied, it becomes difficult to maintain personal hygiene, to cook healthy food and everything else that has to do with water. At the end of day, water-borne diseases become rampant," said Portia Manangazira, the director of epidemiology and disease control in the ministry.
24 430 cases of dysentery, another water borne disease, and a related 76 deaths have been recorded so far this year while diarrhoea accounted for is 358, 391 reported cases and 573 deaths.
Zimbabwe is struggling to provide potable water due to poor service deliver by cash-strapped councils, with some suburbs going for months without supplies.
Municipalities are struggling to procure water treatment chemicals and to upgrade obsolete purifying equipment.
Post published in: News
We in the Zimbabwe Social Democrats have warned that the nation is sitting a ticking health time-bomb – the unseasonally high deaths due to waterborne diseases is cause for alarm – and social time-bomb if nothing is not done to end the economic meltdown. The way to end the economic meltdown is this Mugabe regime to step down so the democratic reforms necessary for free and fair elections, which MDC should have implemented during the GNU, can finally be implemented and fresh elections held.
Only a new government with the democratic mandate of the people and the trust of the interna-tional community can meaningfully end Zimbabwe’s economic crisis and take the nation forward. It is the only way out.
The longer this regime hangs on to power the worse the economic meltdown will get. How many more people dying from such preventable diseases as typhoid will it take to open this regime’s eyes to the reality that it has failed and it is therefore time for it to go?