Secret deaths send Zimbabwe toll soaring, say charities

Thousands of Zimbabweans are dying, uncounted and out of sight, from illnesses as a cholera epidemic grips the country, health groups said today.

Even as the official death toll from the disease climbed into the hundreds, international and local organisations said many more were dying needlessly in a disaster critics blame on President Robert Mugabe’s government.

The toll will never be known, according to Itai Rusike, executive director of the Community Working Group on Health – a civil society network grouping 35 national organisations.

“Zimbabwe used to have one of the best surveillance systems in the region,” he said.

“But phones are not working, nurses are not there, so their information system has collapsed. It is very difficult to tell how many people have died.”

“These are symptoms of a failed state. Nothing is working.”

Charity Oxfam agreed with estimates of thousands of unreported deaths due to the collapse of the health system and said the situation will get worse with the onset of the rainy season, which lasts until February.

“When you look at people who are already weakened by hunger, many already weakened by HIV and AIDS, and with rainy season comes malaria, and we know anthrax is spreading, it’s really just a recipe for disaster,” a spokeswoman said.

She said many people Oxfam interviewed in Zimbabwe say they have cut back to one meal in three days. Some are trying to survive on insects and berries.

Once a major food exporter, Zimbabwe has been crippled by shortages of necessities including food and medicine as Mugabe, the leader since independence in 1980, clings to power.

As businesses collapse, unemployment has risen to 80% with the majority of the population depending on handouts from a growing diaspora; more than a third of a population has fled, many to South Africa and Britain, but some as far as New Zealand.

In a new health report published last week, the civic group Women of Zimbabwe Arise recounted the case of an eight-year-old boy who fell in a school yard and twisted his knee.

“A week later, he was dead,” the report said. “The death certificate cited cause of death as ’swollen knee’ ... But the real cause of death is clear criminal negligence of the worst kind on the part of the ZANU-PF government.”

To the cholera deaths, the report said, it was necessary to add people with diabetes who run out of insulin, appendicitis cases, asthma attacks, bleeding ulcers and septicaemia – “all treatable conditions from which thousands of deaths are now occurring.”

Save the Children said hundreds, if not thousands of pregnant women and their children “stand a very high risk of death.”

Zimbabwe director Rachel Pounds said the United Nations reported that 700 women were recently turned away from hospitals in Harare that are no longer able to provide maternity services.

Last week, Health Minister David Parirenyatwa appealed for help from international organisations.

Charities said the cholera epidemic could be linked directly to the government’s failures. The disease is caused by contaminated water and food, in Zimbabwe’s case the collapse of water and sewage services.

Mugabe’s government took control of water supplies from city and town councils when the councils were taken over by opposition politicians in elections three years ago.

Last week, water authorities cut all supplies in Harare saying they had no purifying chemicals and feared piping contaminated water would help spread the disease.