The deaths brings to 124 the number to have died of the disease this year across the country, according to the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR)’s figures.
Harare city healthy officials have traced the recent outbreak of cholera in Budiriro to a contaminated well where some of the residents of Budiriro had been fetching their domestic water supplies.
All across the city of Harare, residents are being forced to fetch water from vulnerable sources owing to the non-supply of clean water by the ZANU-PF government’s appointed ZINWA. Since ZINWA took over the distribution of water supplies from the city, residents have endured constant water cuts, some lasting as long as as three months.
“We are worried by the way is spreading around the country, but we are putting in measures to eradicate it,” Health minister Dr David Parirenyatwa, who led ZANU-PF units out in Murehwa during the ZANU-PF campaign of violence prior to the June 27 election, said.
In addition to the fatal cases, another 40 people have been infected by the malady and 26 of those are being treated at nearby Beatrice Infectious Diseases Hospital.
The latest cholera outbreak in Budiriro comes after ZINWA failed to supply the township with clean water for the past two months.
Long has the ZANU-PF government been told to take the distribution of water seriously, but the government, instead of supplying ZINWA with foreign currency so it could improve the water reticulation, chose to buy cars and gifts for judges and other civil servants.
Medical sources say the problem of the cholera is far more widespread than Robert Mugabe’s authorities admit.
Since September, 16 people have died in the dormitory township of Chitungwiza on Harare’s southern outskirts.
ZADHR said the repeated outbreaks of the disease “indicates the absence of capacity and ability of the government to manage public health.”
Government officials have been on their toes trying to contain the spread of the disease. In addition to quarantining people in Budiriro, the government is now supplying the residents of the township with clean water and has launched a campaign to shutdown contaminated wells.
Water supplies to the crowded townships that house most of the capital’s poor like Mabvuku, Tafara, Glenview, and Zengeza have dried up, resulting in burst pipes and drains that send rivers of raw effluent running through the streets, filtering into the unprotected wells that people are forced to dig to for water.
Without an urgent operation to restore water supplies, the onset of the rainy season “could result in cholera becoming endemic,” ZADHR said.
Medical officials said that the latest cholera outbreak will likely claim more lives before it can be brought under control. The conditions for the epidemic to spread are still in place and it was unlikely that it would stop, they warned the ZANU-PF government.
Zimbabwe’s health care system, once one of the best in Africa, has all but collapsed.
The continued march of the cholera epidemic across the city, unchecked, is but one exhibit of how far the health system has collapsed – Harare Tribune