The Sunday News
Munyaradzi Musiiwa, Midlands Correspondent
THE Gweru City Council has stepped up the fight against typhoid which claimed nine lives and affected more than 1 500 in Gweru in the past three weeks by training schools, colleges and health staff from Midlands State University to be proactive and on how to deal with suspected cases.
In an interview, Gweru Town Clerk, Ms Elizabeth Gwatipedza said schools and higher and tertiary education institutions would soon re-open therefore there was a need for authorities at those respective institutions to be proactive.
Ms Gwatipedza said the training exercise has already started at MSU to capacitate health personnel at the institution on how to deal with suspected cases of typhoid.
“Following the outbreak of typhoid in Gweru, we have decided to start training schools and higher and tertiary education institutions so that they are proactive and be able to prevent the spread of the disease. The training has already started at MSU because they are opening soon. MSU has about 23 000 students concentrated in one area. So, due to the interactivity of students at learning institutions, there is high risk of spreading of typhoid.
We want them to be able to prevent the spread of the disease as well as dealing with suspected cases. Our health director Mr Sam Sekenhamo is in charge of the trainings,” she said.
Ms Gwatipedza said the task force set by the Ministry of Health and Child Care has managed to contain typhoid and there were no new cases being reported.
“We are happy that yesterday (Wednesday) we treated 17 cases. These are not new cases but these are people who were just admitted. The taskforce has managed to contain the situation and our hope is that very soon we would have wiped out the disease.
“We suspect that the water was contaminated at household level because we traced our pipes and we did not see any cross contamination of sewer trespassing into clean water pipes,” she said.
