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Operation Murambatsvina - Countrywide evictions of urban poor - Index of articles
Zimbabwe
demolitions "Breath of Fresh Air", Minister tells UN Envoy
RedNova
News
July 06, 2005
http://www.rednova.com/news/health/166851/
Text of report
by Zimbabwean TV on 6 July
[Newsreader]
The minister of health and child welfare, Dr David Parirenyatwa,
says the clean-up exercise will enable his ministry to fully implement
the Public Health Act, which entails inspection of buildings and
public places to ensure cleanliness and prevention of disease outbreaks.
[Reporter] Outlining
the social and health aspects of the clean- up campaign to the visiting
UN envoy [Anna Tibaijuka], the minister of health and child welfare,
Dr David Parirenyatwa said the situation, which was in the capital
and the towns before the clean- up exercise had got out of hand.
[Parirenyatwa]
I could not implement the Public Health Act because of the situation
that there was in Harare and other cities in this country - the
overcrowding, the degree of sewage, the danger to clean water supplies
the number of rodents that have sprouted up, the number of street
children. In Mbare, a high-density suburb, because of over crowding,
the number of TB cases had risen to a density of 1,000 per 100,000.
In the general population it is 350. If you add this to the number
of vendors, some of them in commercial sex and you add the danger
of cholera of gastroenteritis and in some cities dog bites had increased.
And that is why I am emphasizing that as minister of health I was
very frustrated on how I could implement the Public Health Act.
So it was a breath of fresh air when the clean-up exercise came
up.
[Reporter] David
Parirenyatwa says his ministry fully supports the government initiative
to provide decent and well-planned houses to the people of Zimbabwe.
The Public Health
Act says there is need to regularly inspect all buildings and public
places in a town to prevent disease outbreaks.
The government
recently embarked on a clean-up campaign to rid cities and towns
of illegal activities as well as restoring them to their former
status in a move aimed at reversing urban migration, which has created
unsustainable slums. The operation has been ended, with the launch
of a reconstruction programme, which will see the development of
housing and other infrastructure to benefit mostly people affected
by the clean up exercise.
Source: BBC
Monitoring Newsfile
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