THE World Health Organisation (WHO) says South Africa’s cholera epidemic, which has killed 66 people and infected another 20_000 since August, is a wake-up call to government to speed up development in rural areas.
Cholera, which has hit the rural poor who depend on contaminated rivers for their drinking water, has swept across six southern African nations and left at least 140 people dead.
Urging government to provide emergency water supplies as part of a wider strategy to stop the spread of the disease, WHO director for southern Africa, Welile Shasha, said there were many communities living in areas where water was not available.
”Cholera is now a wake-up call for us to look at rural development in a different way. It is providing a convenient yardstick for effectiveness and success of government programmes,” Shasha said.
A WHO report said many other people lacked access to safe drinking water, thus helping to spread the disease.
It said the government needed to come up with a short and medium-term strategy ”that addresses water and sanitation needs, including rehabilitation of existing water sources, provision of emergency water supply and sanitation where needed”.
Cholera is a bacterial disease spread through water and unsanitary conditions. It causes severe diarrhoea and its victims die from the shock of dehydration.
The WHO said the cholera epidemic was also putting added pressure on already overstretched hospitals in some areas. It said in Eshowe, the worst-hit district in KwaZulu-Natal, cholera patients occupied almost 25% of hospital beds.
Earlier, communities in cholera-ravaged areas were told to build their own toilets as part of measures to combat the disease as government did not have the funds.
Provincial health minister Zweli Mkhize told people in Empangeni and Eshowe that 87 000 households in northern KwaZulu-Natal lacked proper sanitation facilities, including basic toilets.
Mkhize said it would cost more than R90m to provide toilets to these households and the province had already depleted the money it was given to fight another cholera outbreak last year. People should therefore take matters into their own hands, he said. – AFP/Reuters