KEY POINTS:
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's President, is trying to hide the real extent of the cholera epidemic sweeping across his nation by silencing health workers and restricting access to the huge number of death certificates that give the same cause of death.
A senior official in the Health Ministry said yesterday that more than 3000 people had died from the water-borne disease in the past two weeks, 10 times the widely reported death toll of just over 300.
"But even this higher figure is still an understatement because very few bother to register the deaths of their relatives these days," said the official, who requested anonymity.
He said the Health Ministry, which once presided over a medical system that was the envy of Africa, had been banned from issuing accurate statistics about the deaths, and that certificates for the fraction of deaths that had been registered were being closely guarded by the Home Affairs Ministry.
Yet the evidence of how this plague is hurting the people of Zimbabwe is there for all to see at the burial grounds in this collapsing country.
"When you encounter such long queues in other countries, they are of people going to the cinema or a football match; certainly not into cemeteries to bury loved ones as we have here," said Munyaradzi Mudzingwa, who lives just outside Harare, where the epidemic is believed to have started.
When he buried his brother, who succumbed to cholera last week, he said he had counted at least 40 other families lining up to bury loved ones. "That's sadly the depth of the misery into which Mugabe has sunk us."
Unit O, his suburb, has been without running water for 13 months. The only borehole in the area, built with the help of aid agencies, attracted so many people day and night that it was rarely possible to access its water.
Residents were forced to dig their own wells, which became contaminated with sewage. The water residents haul up is a breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria, including Vibrio cholerae, which causes severe vomiting and diarrhoea and can kill within hours if not treated.
The way to prevent death is, for the Zimbabwean people, agonisingly simple: antibiotics and rehydration.
But the sewerage system is broken and soap is hard to come by.
Harare's Central Hospital officially closed last week, doctors and nurses are scarce and even those clinics offering a semblance of service do not have access to safe, clean drinking water and ask patients to bring their own.
As the ordinary people suffer Mugabe is locked in a bitter power struggle with the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai over who should control which ministries in a unity Government. The President has threatened to name a Cabinet without the approval of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change, which could see the whole peace deal unravel.
Talks were continuing between them in Johannesburg yesterday with little sign of a breakthrough, but pressure is growing abroad to strike a deal as the humanitarian crisis deepens.
Hundreds of Zimbabweans have streamed into South Africa, desperate for medical care. Officials in the South African border town of Musina say their local hospital has treated more than 150 cholera patients so far.
"[The outbreak] is a clear indication that ordinary Zimbabweans are the true victims of their leaders' lack of political will," said South African spokesman Themba Maseko.
Yesterday Oxfam warned that a million of Zimbabwe's 13 million population were at risk from the cholera epidemic, and predicted that the crisis would worsen significantly next month, when heavy rains start.
A DEADLY BUT PREVENTABLE DISEASE
* Cholera is caused when a toxin-producing bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, infects the gut. It is carried in water containing human faeces.
* In its most severe form, and without treatment of antibiotics and rehydration, it causes acute diarrhoea and dehydration, and can kill within hours of symptoms showing.
* John Snow, a doctor in 19th-century London, was the first to link it with contaminated water when he studied an outbreak in Soho in 1854, which had killed more than 600 in a few weeks.
* Until then, it was thought to be spread by a mysterious "miasma" in the atmosphere. Snow showed the outbreak came from a single contaminated well in Broad St. He had the handle of the well removed, and the epidemic stopped almost overnight.
* Preventing cholera relies on proper sewage treatment, sanitation and water purification.
- INDEPENDENT
