One could date the collapse to November, when the government closed the public hospitals in the capital, Harare. On Nov. 18, President Robert Mugabe’s police, wielding batons, attacked doctors, nurses and medical students from the teaching hospital. But given that cholera has killed morethan 1,600 people and sickened some 33,000 others, we might date the collapse to August, when the public hospitals lost running water. Imagine a hospital without running water for three months — with no functioning toilets, no soap, an empty pharmacy, and not enough food for patients or staff.
Post published in: News
9.1.2009
13:28
In Zimbabwe, a Cancer Called Mugabe
 Physicians for Human Rights sent a team to Zimbabwe last month to investigate the cholera epidemic that has ravaged lives there since August. As part of that team, we found something much more disturbing even than cholera: a people facing an array of health threats in a country where the most basic functions of the state -- clean water, sanitation and health-care delivery -- have collapsed.