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Health problems rise as Zimbabwe infrastructure decays
MacDonald Dzirutwe, Reuters
November 12, 2005

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L12563187.htm

HARARE - Zimbabwe's infrastructure is fast decaying, worsening sanitary conditions and threatening the health of a population already burdened by a six-year economic recession.

"Our budgets are failing to cope with the demand for services but our hands are tied because we can only increase rates with government approval, which usually is not forthcoming," Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube, mayor of the second city of Bulawayo, told Reuters on Saturday.

"The threat of a serious health crisis is there, but we try to manage with the few resources we have," he added.

State media has reported more than 200 people have been diagnosed with dysentery in Harare and Chitungwiza town, 30 km (19 miles) southwest of the capital where there are water shortages and a broken sewage system.

On Saturday, the official Herald newspaper reported diarrhoeal infections had killed 14 minors in the capital Harare since September as a result of contaminated food.

Zimbabwe's economic crisis, the worst since the end of British rule in 1980, has paralyzed the country with rising unemployment, and shortages of fuel and food. It has also produced a foreign currency crunch that has hit imports, including of key treatment chemicals.

Service delivery has nearly collapsed in the country's cities and towns as local authorities battle to provide residents with water, garbage collection and repairs to a creeking infrastructure.

Critics say President Robert Mugabe inherited a thriving economy at independence in 1980, but that years of mismanagement has turned the southern African nation into a near failed state.

Mugabe blames the country's economic woes on sanctions and economic isolation imposed by Western nations led by former colonial power Britain.

Built in colonial Rhodesia, most of Zimbabwe's infrastructure was meant to cater for a small black urban working class but a surge in the population and years of neglect has seen most cities and towns failing to cope. State television has often shown graphic images of some residents in Chitungwiza fetching water from open wells, often near streams of human waste. Some residents in Harare and small towns around the country face the same problem.

Erratic water supplies are blamed on a combination of drought and the shortage of treatment materials.

Chris Tapfumaneyi, the medical superintendant at the state-run Harare Central Hospital, said the deadly cases of diarrhoeal infections were reported in the black townships Mbare, Highfield, Mabvuku and Mufakose, which have been the most hit by a collapse in services.

"What is alarming is that it seems the disease keeps attacking more under-5 children and at the moment we have a number of cases we are dealing with," Chris Tapfumaneyi, the medical superitenant at state hospital Harare Central Hospital told the Herald.

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