SA, Zim health officials hold crisis meeting on cholera outbreak

SA, Zim health officials hold crisis meeting on cholera outbreak

• 2 Zimbabwean cholera victims die in SA

• SA treats 68 cholera patients on Zim border

• Cholera outbreak hits Harare, Chitungwiza

• Report reveals srorry state of Zimbabwe's health service

• Parirenyatwa stops surgical operations in drug crisis

• 21 buffalo die in feared anthrax outbreak

• Malaria kills 329 people in Zimbabwe

• Anthrax outbreak kills 1500 animals

Posted to the web: 24/11/2008 08:25:31
SOUTH African and Zimbabwean health officials met at the weekend to tackle a cholera outbreak which has claimed hundreds of lives, a South African official said Monday.

"We had a meeting on Sunday with health officials from Zimbabwe. It was a very fruitful meeting. We did an assessment of Zimbabwe's health needs to enable us to tackle the problem," a spokesman for the Musina Municipality health department, Phuti Seloba, said.

"As of Sunday, our hospital in Musina has received (treated) a total of 168 cholera patients since the outbreak of the disease on November 15, three of whom have died," he said.

Twenty-seven cholera patients are currently in the hospital, he said.

Musina is a South African town near the border with Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe's economic collapse has fuelled the outbreak as basic water and sanitation services break down across the country.

Some 160 people have already died from cholera in Zimbabwe and up to 1,4 million people are at risk of contracting the disease, Doctors Without Borders said last week.

"During the meeting, held in the Zimbabwean border town of Beitbridge, we all realised that the problem is neither Zimbabwean nor South African,” said Seloba. “This is our common problem and we need to solve it jointly. We need to look at the health gaps and find a way to fill them by tackling the source of the problem."

He declined to reveal the form of assistance that South Africa may render Zimbabwe over the waterborne disease.

"We realise that Zimbabwe lacks health equipments and drugs," he said.

South Africa’s cabinet vowed action on the cholera outbreak last week, promising to “assist the people of Zimbabwe to address the cholera outbreak as well as scaling up malaria control activities in the cross border area.”

“A strategy will be put in place on an urgent basis to provide assistance to the people of Zimbabwe and to provide support to our health authorities in the Limpopo province to enable them to cope with the serious situation,” Cabinet said in a statement.

South Africa also set up an Interdepartmental Task Team “to urgently identify and implement measures to ensure that the reported service delivery crisis in Zimbabwe does not lead to increased cross-border movement to the health facilities in the Limpopo province that are already over-stretched.”

More than 1,000 cholera patients are in Beitbridge health facilities, he said.

South African health officials said that they are making efforts to check further spread of disease into its territory.

Last week, a South African truck driver was found with cholera in the southern coastal city of Durban, after he returned from Zimbabwe.
JOIN THE DEBATE ON THIS ARTICLE ON THE NEWZIMBABWE.COM FORUMS
newsdesk@newzimbabwe.com