Cholera Is Raging, Despite Denial by Zimbabwe President

Via NYTimes -

Cholera swept through the five youngest children in the Chigudu family with cruel and bewildering haste. On a recent Saturday, they chased each other through streets flowing with raw sewage, and chattered happily as they bedded down for the night.

The onslaught of diarrhea and vomiting began around midnight. Relatives frantically prepared solutions of water, sugar and salt for the youngsters, aged 20 months to 12 years, to drink. But by morning, they were limp and hollow-eyed. The disease was draining their bodies of fluid.

“Then they started to die,” said their brother Lovegot, 18. “Prisca was first, second Sammy, then Shantel, Clopas and Aisha, the littlest one, last.”

A ferocious cholera epidemic, spread by water contaminated with human excrement, has stricken more than 16,000 people across Zimbabwe since August and killed more than 780. Health experts are warning that the number of cases could surpass 60,000, and that half the country’s population of 12 million is at risk.

The outbreak is yet more evidence that Zimbabwe’s most fundamental public services — from water and sanitation to public schools and hospitals — are shutting down, much like the organs of a severely dehydrated cholera victim.

Zimbabwe’s once promising economy, disastrously mismanaged by President Robert G. Mugabe’s government, has been spiraling downward for almost a decade, but residents here say the free fall has gained frightening velocity in recent weeks. Most of the nation’s schools, which were once the pride of Africa, producing a highly literate population, have virtually ceased to function as teachers, whose salaries no longer even cover the cost of the bus fare to work, quit showing up.

With millions enduring severe and worsening hunger and cholera spilling into neighboring countries, there are rising international calls for Mr. Mugabe to go after 28 years in power. But he only seems to be digging in and even declared Thursday that the nation’s cholera epidemic had ended, just a day after the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was grave enough to pose “serious regional implications.”