BEIRA: Dozens of fragile patients poured into a clinic in the wrecked Mozambican port city of Beira on Wednesday, as the government said it had confirmed the first five cases of cholera in the wake of deadly Cyclone Idai.
Thousands of people were trapped for more than a week in submerged villages without access to clean water after the cyclone smashed into Mozambique on March 14, causing catastrophic flooding. Relief efforts have increasingly focused on containing outbreaks of waterborne and infectious diseases.
In Munhava in central Beira, doctors and nurses at a newly set up treatment centre said they are treating around 140 patients a day for diarrhoea. Many of the patients arrive too weak to walk.
A Reuters reporter saw two men carrying an unconscious woman from a rickshaw into the clinic, trying to cover her naked body with a sheet.
Inside, those too ill to sit lay on concrete benches attached to intravenous drips. Mothers were perched on plastic chairs in the courtyard, trying to get their children to drink rehydration salts from green cups.
“He won’t take it,” said Marisa Salgado, 22, holding her boy, aged 1-1/2, who stared with glazed eyes.
It was the second time she had been to the clinic this week, Salgado said. Her child’s diarrhoea returned as soon as she got home, despite the chlorine solution nurses gave her to purify their water.
“I’m scared. I don’t know what to do,” she said.
Cholera is endemic to Mozambique, which has had regular outbreaks over the past five years. About 2,000 people were infected in the last outbreak, which ended in February 2018, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
But the scale of the damage to Beira’s water and sanitation infrastructure coupled with its dense population have raised fears that an epidemic now would be difficult to put down. — Reuters
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