Since August, a ferocious cholera epidemic, spread by water contaminated with human excrement, has stricken more than 16,000 people across Zimbabwe and killed more than 780. President Robert G. Mugabe claimed that the epidemic had ended on Thursday, yet health experts are warning that the number of cases may surpass 60,000 and that half the nation’s population of 12 million is at risk.

The New York Times reports that, “the outbreak is yet more evidence that Zimbabwe’s most fundamental public services – including water and sanitation, public schools and hospitals – are shutting down, much like the organs of a severely dehydrated cholera victim.”

The once promising economy of Zimbabwe, destructively mismanaged by Mr. Mugabe’s government, has been spiraling in a free-fall for nearly a decade, but residents here say the downfall has gained frightening velocity in recent weeks. Most of the country’s schools that were once the pride of Africa, producing a highly-literate population, have essentially ceased to function as teachers, whose salaries can no longer cover the cost of the bus fare to their jobs, quit showing up.

Since millions are enduring severe and worsening hunger, and cholera spreading into neighboring countries, there are an increasing number of international callas for Mr. Mugabe to step down after 28 years of dictatorial rule. Nonetheless, he only seems to be digging in, and his announcement about the epidemic’s end occurred only a day after the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was severe enough to carry ‘serious regional implications.’

According to the NY Times, “water cutoffs are common and prolonged here, but last week the taps went dry in virtually all of the capitals’ densely packed suburbs, where people most need clean drinking water to wash their hands and food, essential steps to containing cholera. On rotting streets bustling with out-of-school children and unemployed adults, piles of uncollected garbage mounted and thick brown sludge bubbling up from burst sewer lines.

Harare, the capital’s two biggest hospitals, sprawling facilities that once would have offered sophisticated care in just such an epidemic, had mostly shut down weeks earlier after doctors and nurses, their salaries becoming worthless by the country’s crippling hyperinflation, just stopped coming to work.

In July, inflation officially hit 231 million percent, but John Robertson, an independent economist in Zimbabwe, roughly estimates that it has now surged to an astonishing eight-quintillion percent, which is an eight followed by 18 zeros.

To read the entire article from the New York Times, link here:

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