Zimbabwe: 30 strains of cholera as death toll approaches 4000
A specialist team dispatched to Zimbabwe under the auspices of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has discovered 30 cholera strains in a country blighted by the waterborne disease.
JOHANNESBURG, 3 March 2009 (IRIN) - From the start of the outbreak in August 2008 and up until 1 March 2009, cholera has claimed the lives of 3,939 people, infected 85,300, and has been reported in all the country's 10 provinces and 55 of its 62 districts.
The International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (ICDDR), based in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka, found that in one of its 16 Zimbabwean test sites, all water sources - borehole, tap water, drain water, and shallow wells - in Budiriro, a working-class district in the capital, Harare, were contaminated by cholera.
"It was found that all the water sources that have been sampled were heavily contaminated with total coliforms, and some of them were also contaminated with faecal coliforms. The interesting finding is that the borehole was also contaminated with faecal coliforms," the ICDDR said in its preliminary report.
"The count of total coliform in 100ml of water is too numerous to count and the faecal coliform count was 26/100ml, which is many times higher than the WHO recommended level."
Coliforms are a large group of bacteria found in the intestinal tracts of mammals and are often an indicator of the presence of disease; WHO guidelines stipulate that drinking water should not contain a single coliform.
In Budiriro, as of 28 February, 196 cholera deaths and 8,154 cases - nearly one-tenth of all cholera cases in Zimbabwe so far - had been reported.
The highest number of deaths at a specific site so far, according to the WHO, has been at the Beatrice Road Infectious Diseases Hospital, a government clinic near the sprawling Harare township of Mbare, where 265 people have died and 5,135 cases have been reported.
During the investigations in January 2009 by the ICDDR at sites across the country, from Harare to the second city of Bulawayo in the southwest, to Mutare in the east and in other rural locations, "a total of 30 [cholera] strains were isolated," the report said.
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