A lack of understanding about cholera and a failure to adapt social customs in rural Zimbabwe to curb the waterborne disease is ensuring that the death toll will keep rising. Cholera has rampaged through Zimbabwe since August 2008, killing more than 4,000 people and infecting over 91,000, and although the World Health Organization (WHO) recently said reports of new cases were slowing, it warned that the “the risk of the outbreak restarting” was “real”.
Early in March [2009], Simplicius Mushayakarara, 49, returned to his rural home in Musana, about 85km northeast of the capital, Harare, after attending a funeral. His stepdaughter died from cholera but he and his wife were saved by the intervention of their son, who works in the nearby town of Bindura, in Mashonaland Central Province.
[...] “At the funeral we freely shook hands, as our custom requires, ate food without properly washing our hands, and some of us even touched the body of the deceased person as a way of bidding him farewell. To us, cholera was a disease that only occurred in towns and cities,” he said.
Mushayakarara’s son, Tatenda [...] was too late to prevent his sister’s death, but his quick thinking saved his parents. “Tatenda gave us a salt and sugar solution and organized transport that ferried us to Bindura, where we were hospitalised and treated,” Mushayakarara said.
[...] Sekai Chapwanya, 38, a community-based HIV/AIDS caregiver in a neighbouring village, has urged health officials to ramp up cholera education campaigns. “The majority of the people living in rural communities lack knowledge on how best to prevent cholera,” she told IRIN. “Health officials seem to have been concentrating on urban areas, maybe because that is where most of the deaths have occurred”.[...] Since cholera gained a foothold in rural areas Chapwanya has concentrated on teaching communities about preventing and curing the disease, with some tacit support from NGOs but none from government.
[...] The spread of cholera was worsened by the rainy season she said, and rural communities depended on water from the rivers for drinking and cooking.
[...] Tsitsi Singizi, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Zimbabwe spokesperson, told IRIN the organization had embarked on cholera education in the rural areas. “We are also providing non-food items to promote standard hygiene in cholera-affected areas, and these include the soaps and buckets used in chlorination, while at the same time providing oral and intravenous rehydration,” she said.
Source: IRIN, 30 Mar 2009
