The Financial Gazette

Staff Reporter

A HEATH crisis is slowly emerging in Zimbabwe amid fears of a humanitarian disaster as the typhoid outbreak takes root; four years after the cholera epidemic claimed more than 4 000 lives.

According to a Parliamentary report on health, the government is not paying much attention to the health sector, leaving donors to do most of the work.
Legislators said the country’s over reliance on donors for drugs was unsustainable and could give rise to a national crisis should they decide to withdraw immediately.
At high risk are HIV and Aids patients. Over 600 000 people on Anti-Retroviral drugs are getting their supplies from donor-funded agencies.
The report added that much emphasis was being put on curative methods and not preventive initiatives to pre-empt outbreaks.
“We were pleasantly surprised that about 98 percent of the drugs in this country are donor funded and only two percent are provided for in the budget,” said the Health Committee report.
“We also noticed that most of that funding is going for curative services, notwithstanding that there is an old adage that ‘prevention is better that cure’. The recommended level of funding is about 16-20 percent for preventive medicine that will ensure that we do not have outbreaks of typhoid, cholera and other diseases.”
This week, the  City of Harare’s director of health services, Prosper Chonzi, said 1 700 typhoid cases had been reported in the capital city, 600 of them in the high density suburbs.
Members of Parliament said there was poor management at  medical stores run by the government.
The State-run National Pharm-aceutical Company of Zimbabwe was said to be struggling after the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare consumed almost all the drugs from the national pharmacy worth about US$3,65 million without any payment at a time when the institution is crying out for recapitalisation.
Piles and piles of disused assets were said to be lying idle at hospitals, clinics and district offices, among others. It was recmmended that these assets be sold to raise revenue for the government or that they be handed to legislators for refurbishment through the Constituency Development Fund.
“Our mortuaries in the main hospitals are in a sorry state, when we visited some of these mortuaries, we discovered that the bodies were decomposing,” lawmakers added in the report.

Comments (1)

Show/Hide comments

Show/Hide comment form

Name

Comment

smaller | bigger

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment