Zambia: MSF responds to worst cholera outbreak in years
Over the last five weeks the number of cholera cases has risen dramatically to more than 4,500, while more than 120 people have lost their lives. Despite hopes that the outbreak has reached its peak the previous week and that the number of cholera cases will start decreasing, heavy rains that continue to cause severe floods in the city could potentially worsen the situation in the coming weeks.
MSF teams are working around the clock to treat people affected by cholera and try to contain the spread of the outbreak. MSF has set up three cholera treatment centres (CTC) in Matero, Chawama and Kanyama, with a capacity of 567 beds, and is also supporting 17 cholera treatment units (CTU). Since March 4, MSF teams in collaboration with the Ministry of Health have treated 4,020 patients in the three CTC’s. ‘Last week we suffered the peak of the outbreak with a total of 1054 cases admitted. This number of cholera cases is by far the highest recorded in the last decade’, said Luke Arend, Head of Mission of MSF in Zambia. ‘Due to the severity of this outbreak, we are stepping up our intervention, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Health of Zambia.’
Besides providing direct treatment to cholera patients, MSF is also working intensively for the prevention of the spread of the outbreak in the worst hit areas of the city. MSF water and sanitation staff is providing over 500,000 litres of chlorinated water per day in the affected neighbourhoods of Lusaka, while a team of nearly 50 contact tracers is working on a daily basis for disinfecting the homes of cholera patients, providing people chlorine for treating their water and teaching them of safe practices to avoid transmission. MSF is also supporting another team of drainage diggers to remove flood waters in the worst affected areas. More than 100 volunteers, with the help of a drama group as well, are conducting outreach activities in the communities with the aim to inform people on how to prevent the spread of the disease. MSF has also produced a television announcement about the prevention of cholera that is aired on the national television channel.
Cholera is endemic in Zambia. Over the previous years, Lusaka has seen repeated outbreaks during the rainy season. The lack of provision of drainage, access to clean water and poor hygiene and sanitation conditions are the route causes of the recurrence and severity of outbreaks. ‘The vast majority of the population in Lusaka is living in such conditions that make them extremely vulnerable to cholera due to the lack of access to safe water, drainage and good sanitation facilities. What is clear is that much more has to be done by the authorities in the short-term to improve cholera response preparedness and to avert the needless loss of so many lives each year. There is also a need for political commitment to long-term infrastructural investment in drainage, sanitation and water provision in these unplanned peri-urban areas of Lusaka to rid the city of this deadly cholera. For far too long there has been neglect in provision of these basic services,’ said Luke Arend.
MSF has been working in Zambia since 1999. In this cholera emergency intervention, 17 international staff are working alongside more than 500 Zambian colleagues in Lusaka.
For more information go to http://msf.org.za/
Author
-
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
View all posts
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Zambia: MSF responds to worst cholera outbreak in years
by Health-e News, Health-e News
April 12, 2010