Zimbabwe / Cholera outbreak / Over 83,000 cases of the disease and more than 3,800 deaths.
HARARE, Zimbabwe, February 25, 2009/African Press Organization (APO)/ — Daily press briefing by the office of the spokesperson for the UN secretary-general
Turning to Zimbabwe, Catherine Bragg, who is the Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator and United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, arrived in Harare over the weekend.
The humanitarian assessment mission comes at a time when Zimbabwe is experiencing the worst cholera outbreak since the mid-1990s, an outbreak that has now led to over 83,000 cases of the disease and more than 3,800 deaths.
Today, she visited a food distribution centre and a food warehouse. At the district visited, 60,000 people out of a total population of 83,000 people are receiving food aid for the next two months until harvest comes in. The harvest in the area is expected to be poor due to a combination of factors, including drought and shortage of seeds and agricultural inputs.
The mission, which included participants from the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP), also visited a cholera treatment centre outside Harare.
Meanwhile, in Geneva, WHO today noted that there were more than 364 cholera treatment centres around the country in Zimbabwe. The tendency now was to decentralize the main command centre in Harare treating cholera and to create small command centres across the country to ensure the ability to reach people in distant villages.
More than 61 per cent of the deaths were still taking place outside treatment centres and in local communities, which meant that many people still did not have access to treatment centres.
SOURCE : United Nations – Office of the Spokesperson of the Secretary-General
