When Jessica Muzambezi woke up one morning and saw that raw sewage was leaking from a burst pipe into the street near her home, she tried to keep her two-year-old son Jadon inside. But the soccer-loving boy was unhappy being kept indoors, and eventually he escaped onto the street to kick a ball around.
Within a day, Jadon was vomiting and suffering stomach pains. His parents took him to a clinic and then a hospital. Less than a week later, he was dead from cholera – one of the suspected 178 cholera deaths and 10,336 cases in Zimbabwe this year.
“We don’t have a child anymore,” Ms. Muzambezi said. “He was our only child. It is painful. We’ve been left with a wound.”
As cholera spreads across the country, more than 10 million Zimbabweans are now at risk of contracting the water-borne disease, which can kill within hours if untreated, health workers say.
This is the third such outbreak in the country since 2008, a sign of Zimbabwe’s collapsing infrastructure and worsening corruption.
It is not alone. The World Health Organization said in a situation report last month that the number of cholera infections worldwide by mid-October had already exceeded the numbers in recent years, with more than 603,000 cases and more than 3,800 deaths in 29 countries. Case fatality rates are the highest in a decade.
Cholera has become a key indicator of collapse in social stability. Most of the countries with cholera outbreaks this year are also enduring parallel humanitarian crises, such as wars, hunger, drought, flooding or earthquakes, the WHO said.
It cited examples such as Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“Based on the large number of outbreaks and their geographic expansion, as well as a lack of vaccines and other resources, WHO continues to assess the risk at global level as very high,” the agency said.
“Health systems can easily become overwhelmed, hindering not only the ability to mount effective and timely responses but also to establish appropriate preventive measures in the first place,” it added.
Source: The Globe and Mail
