A cholera outbreak has killed over a 100 people in Zimbabwe since February this year.
The deaths have been recorded from over 5,000 infections recorded in the country in the last eight months.
Each of the 10 s province has recorded cholera cases, with the most alarming spikes in the south-eastern provinces of Masvingo and Manicaland, the epicentre of the crisis.
There are fears that the situation could be a repeat of the 2008 outbreak that sparked a national emergency.
Funerals have been restricted to 50 people and forbidding attendees from shaking hands or serving food at the gatherings.
Authorities are also discouraging people from frequenting open-air markets, unlicensed vendors, or outdoor church camps where sanitation is scarce.
Cholera, a water-borne disease caused by ingesting contaminated food or water, often spreads quickly throughout Zimbabwe because of its poor sanitation infrastructure and limited clean water.
Many Zimbabweans, especially in remote villages, stay without tap water for months at a time, forcing them to draw from unsafe wells or rivers. Raw sewage spilling from busted pipes and heaps of lingering refuse increase the risk of the disease spreading.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has announced plans to drill more boreholes for each of the country’s 35,000 villages in the next year.
Zimbabwe’s current cholera crisis is the worst since 2008, when some 4,000 civilians died in a nationwide outbreak that the government declared a “national emergency”.
Zimbabwe and several southern African states, including Malawi, South Africa, and Mozambique have seen more than a 1,000 of their citizens die from cholera since 2022.
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Source: Africafeeds.com
