Cholera continues to rage out of control as threat moves to rural areas

By Alex Bell
22 January 2009

The cholera epidemic has continued to rage out of control across the country with the official death toll fast approaching the 3000 mark – and the mortality rate is not expected to slow down any time soon.

Within just a week the reported, and therefore official number of deaths, has increased to 2744 and the new figures come as international aid agencies have expressed fears that the threat has taken over the country’s rural areas. At the start of the outbreak last year, the disease was heavily prevalent in densely populated urban areas where the large communities, coupled with the total breakdown of city infrastructure, saw the disease spread quickly through contaminated water sources.

But both an official from World Vision Zimbabwe and one from the medical charity, Doctor Without Borders (Medicins Sans Frontiers), have confirmed the threat has moved to isolated rural areas, making the disease that much harder to contain. World Vision’s cholera response manager told Reuters news agency this week that the disease had shifted to rural areas and that the organisation continued “to have new outbreaks in villages.”

At the same time the Zimbabwe representative for Doctors Without Borders, Manuel Lopez, explained on Thursday that the shift of cholera to rural areas posed serious problems for aid groups trying to contain the disease. He said remote villages had been exposed to cholera because of city dwellers returning home over the Christmas holidays, and added that infected bodies were also being returned to villages for burial, further spreading the disease.

“People in these remote villages have no means to fight this disease and no way of getting treatment,” Lopez explained. “The number of people dying in their homes is impossible to measure.”

Kadoma residents have also told SW Radio Africa that cholera is out of control there, where 13 people have died from the disease since Monday. Health officials are reportedly battling to treat more than 300 patients at the cholera treatment facility in Rimuka and residents have explained that the numbers of patients there have overflowed into tents set up outside the clinic.

Meanwhile the epidemic in South Africa, that officially has claimed 33 lives across the country since last year, has led to an outbreak of violence in the Limpopo province where a 10th cholera death was reported this week.

Two municipal officials have come under attack from residents in the past week, protesting over service delivery standards that the residents say have allowed the cholera epidemic to spread. A councillor’s house in the Greater Tubatse Municipality was burnt down on Monday while the Mayor was threatened with violence while attending a funeral for cholera victims on Saturday. The Mayor’s car was damaged when it was pelted with rocks thrown by an angry mob, seven of whom are now facing malicious damage to property charges.

The death rate in South Africa has soared after health authorities in the Mpumalanga province this week made a shock announcement that 19 people had died in the province from cholera. Medical teams meanwhile are still trying to contain the epidemic in the Limpopo province, where more than 2500 cases have been confirmed.