12 November 2009
Maputo — Another cholera treatment centre in northern Mozambique has been vandalised by a group of people who believe that these centres spread cholera rather than cure it.
The attack took place on a treatment centre at Muadja, in Ancuabe district, Cabo Delgado province, and full details have not yet reached Maputo.
However, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, Leonardo Chavane, told reporters on Thursday "there was agitation which culminated in damage to the centres. Some people are injured and there may also be deaths because of this act".
"This complicates the health dilemma in that part of the country", said Chavane. "It creates difficulties for the authorities to provide health care to people, who may die because of this sort of attitude".
Repeatedly in northern Mozambique malicious rumours have spread alleging that the health workers trying to stamp out cholera are actually spreading the disease. One of the problems is that the Portuguese words for "cholera" and "chlorine" sound similar.
One of the methods of halting the spread of cholera is to disinfect wells with chlorine. But when health workers turn up to disinfect the wells they are accusing of putting cholera in the water. This misunderstanding leads crowds to attack treatment centres. In one particularly absurd case earlier this year, a Red Cross activist was assaulted, buried up to her neck, and nearly murdered, when a mob demanded that she hand over "the cholera" she was allegedly keeping in her house.
This led to further tragedy, when the police arrested 29 people and threw them into a tiny cell in the district of Mogincual, where several others, accused of other crimes, were already incarcerated. The true number of people in the cell may have been as high as 48. That night, 17 March, a dozen of the detainees suffocated to death in the cell.
At the time Health Minister Ivo Garrido said education work needed to be done in local communities so that they could distinguish between "cholera" and "chlorine" and understand that health workers and activists had come to save people not to kill them. It seems that so far this awareness work has not had the desired effect.
Chavane believed there are still opportunists in the communities deliberately stirring up trouble, "with the intention of provoking agitation".
He said that since the cholera outbreak began in Cabo Delgado in mid-August, 322 cases had been diagnosed, 42 in Ancuabe, 22 in Mocimboa da Praia district, and 258 in Montepuez district..
Ancuabe is now of particular concern, since 11 cases were notified there on Wednesday, while new notifications in Montepuez have declined to one or two a day.
The outbreak has claimed four lives, three in Montepuez and one in Ancuabe. Taking the country as a whole, 19,192 cases of cholera have been diagnosed since the start of the year, and 152 of these patients have died.
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