BULAWAYO – A traveler exhibiting symptoms of cholera died at Thorngrove Isolation Hospital in Bulawayo hospital on September 25.
The 88-year-old man, a religious minister whose name has been withheld, is originally from Budiriro in Harare.
Dr Edwin Sibanda, the Bulawayo City Council’s Director of Health Services, said the man travelled to Francistown in Botswana and fell ill with diarrheal symptoms.
“He was not a Bulawayo resident but a resident of Budiriro. He had gone to Botswana and we are unsure on what duties he was doing there but developed symptoms on his way back from Botswana on Sunday, August 23, enroute to Harare,” Dr Sibanda told ZimLive.
“The person decided not to seek treatment while in Botswana and proceeded to the Zimbabwe border. He passed Plumtree border and eventually came to one of our 24-hour clinics in the city and that particular clinic called for an ambulance. He was ferried to Thorngrove Hospital where he was admitted that Sunday but died two days later.”
Dr Sibanda highlighted that although the man died from probable cholera, the laboratory tests came back negative.
“Both rapid tests and the micro biology test or the cultured test were negative. But we treated him as a cholera case until the time he died,” he added.
The man’s family and undertaker had agreed to bury him as a cholera case under set procedures.
“Our colleagues in the Ministry of Health in Mashonaland East cooperated as he was buried in Chivhu. The corpse underwent a special transportation method where it was put in a sealed steel casket and our environmental health officers actually made sure that the body was sealed accordingly. All the disinfection procedures were done properly. The body left Bulawayo last Tuesday evening headed to Chivhu,” he said.
So far, 34 people with suspected cases of cholera have been treated at Thorngrove.
“From these 34, one death occurred which is the 88-year-old who died. The rest were discharged except two. One of the two, as of this morning (Monday) looked stable enough to be discharged. I’m yet to receive an update unless there’s been another admission,” said Dr Sibanda.
He stressed that Bulawayo had no confirmed cholera case but patients who presented with classical symptoms of cholera were treated as such.
“That is those with a history of travel to an area that is known to have had cholera, in particular Budiriro and Glen View in Harare. You must also remember not all cases of cholera would grow under test in the laboratory, otherwise samples have to be cultured. This is so because people tend to have a lot of antibiotics around so that cholera bug may be killed by those antibiotics and by the time the test is done nothing may grow in the laboratory, even if it was cholera,” he explained.
Dr Sibanda said doctors do not wait for lab results to treat cholera because the time from the onset of the symptoms and death, which may occur, can be very short.
“There’s no time to wait for the lab test because someone can die in a matter of hours, so we rely on the clinical picture. From those we treated, people who had probable cholera cases were 12 including the man died but their tests came negative. If it looks like cholera, behaves like cholera and walks like cholera we treat like cholera,” he said.
Health and Child Care Minister Obadiah Moyo, who visited Makokoba to assess the cholera situation with Bulawayo mayor Solomon Mguni last week, said the government’s absolute solution was to rehabilitate water works.
“The final solution is that of making sure we rehabilitate our water and sanitation right through the country so that we all receive clean running water in our households. That is the finality of it. Boreholes, bowsers and all that are just temporary measures. We are not going to blame anyone for causing cholera but we are going to make sure we are going to rid of the disease,” he said.
“Hygiene starts with us, let’s make sure we look after ourselves and keep ourselves clean. Let’s not litter all over but try and keep the environment clean by picking up the garbage around our homes. We must then place the garbage in appropriately designated areas. Cholera is here for real and we have to get rid of this medieval disease once and for all.”
