In Zimbabwe, chaos gives cholera a foothold

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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.

By Robyn Dixon
December 11, 2008


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.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-cholera11-2008dec11,0,4978559.story