In Zimbabwe, chaos gives cholera a foothold
The lack of government services allows the easily treatable disease to spread. The sick and their families must cope alone.
Reporting from Budiriro, Zimbabwe — A bony limb flops from the wheelbarrow in limp resignation. A head lolls amid the pile of blankets. A woman is trundling her elderly mother home from a clinic to die.
In Zimbabwe's cholera- ravaged townships, the dying make their final journey home in wheelbarrows and pushcarts, sent away from clinics by nurses too overworked and underpaid to care much about who survives.
One 71-year-old man, Tarcisius Nerutanga, had to carry his dying 27-year-old son, Allan, home over the weekend on his back. When Nerutanga was summoned to the clinic in Budiriro township, he found Allan dumped on a wooden bench outside, racked by severe vomiting and diarrhea.
"They didn't say anything. They just said, 'Take him home,' " Nerutanga said, as his wife, Loveness, sat on the concrete floor in their tiny room weeping silently. "I knew he was in a terrible state. I didn't think he'd survive."
Allan Nerutanga died Monday.
Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic has killed at least 775 people and sickened more than 16,000, the United Nations reported Wednesday.
Under normal circumstances, the waterborne disease is relatively easy to treat. In Zimbabwe, it is spreading uncontrolled amid the country's economic collapse and political turmoil as the 28-year-old regime of President Robert Mugabe clings to power after disputed elections.
A tangle of problems makes the disease intractable: decaying water system infrastructure; burst sewage pipes left unrepaired; government failure to buy water treatment chemicals or collect garbage; a lack of nurses because of low wages; a shortage of medicines; poverty and declining literacy because of the education system's collapse.
The accumulation of woes leads many observers to fear that a defeatable disease that normally ebbs and flows with the seasons may remain a serious problem for a long time to come.
"It's down to the political situation. If they don't collect the refuse, if they don't repair the sewage, if they don't provide water, it's going to get worse. It's a mammoth task, repairing those things," said Douglas Muzanenhamo of the Combined Harare Residents Assn., a rights advocacy group.
"Without doing that, people will go back to the same situation, back to where this thing has come from," he said. "And they'll get sick again."
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