The Sunday News
Vusumuzi Dube, Senior Municipal Reporter
THE Bulawayo City Council has said the number of people affected by the typhoid outbreak which recently hit parts of the city was gradually going down.
The Director of Health Services, Dr Edwin Sibanda, revealed that in the past week council clinics attended to 20 cases.
“We have noted a reduction in cases over the past week, with our officials attending to just 20 cases. We, however, continue to monitor the situation and collating our figures comparing them to past years therefore we cannot say outrightly that the outbreak has been dealt with.
“What I must emphasise is that it also becomes difficult for us to say whether the cases that we are handling are a direct link to the water contamination because our clinics are always handling patients with diarrhoea related illnesses hence it needs closer analysis for us to then declare an outbreak or whether that outbreak has been handled,” said Dr Sibanda.
He, however, said the local authority was continuing with its mitigation measures in Luveve suburb to further contain the outbreak, inclusive of exemption of the suburb from water shedding and provision of free treatment and medication to those affected.
“We remain committed to addressing this issue which is why we are not going to relax after noting the low figures being treated in our facilities. Which is why we won’t prematurely declare this outbreak over,” he said.
Dr Sibanda also allayed fears that typhoid patients could have been given expired medication. He said the medicine was issued a few days before its expiry date and the course would have been completed by the time it expired.
“Most people believe that when the expiry date is said to be June 2020 it means June 1 but technically it means up to June 30 and Azithromycin — which is the drug in question — is a three-day course, technically we could dispense to the last three days of June 2020 before expiry, which is what took place,” said Dr Sibanda.
Residents representatives said they raised the issue of suspected expired drugs with city council but the local authority dismissed the concern.
“This issue came out during our initial meeting with our lawyers, the Director of Health Services, the Director of Engineering Services (Engineer Simela Dube) and council lawyers. One of our members even produced the packaging of the drugs, with the expiry date. However, council officials claimed it did not carry that if an expiry date is indicated as June 30, then the medication will expire on exactly that which in our view we believe was a lame excuse,” said Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association (BPRA) co-ordinator, Mr Emmanuel Ndlovu.
Luveve residents chairperson Mr Ndaba Ngoma revealed that they had submitted the expired medication to council but got no satisfying response.
“Residents simply decided to stop taking that medication, of which I feel if council had a position on these drugs they should have come and educated the people first rather than forcing the residents to just take it. It is natural that when someone sees that something has expired, they would just throw it away, hence the attitude taken by the residents,” said Mr Ngoma.
At least 13 residents from Luveve succumbed to the water-borne disease while 1 000 cases were treated.
