Michael Sadiki was 53. He was dead inside a week, turned away from the Jubilee Hospital in Hammanskraal for want of beds and staff, then rushed back to die in the emergency room. His cousin Kagiso, sitting under a lemon tree, told AFP he could not remember a time when the town’s tap water was fit to drink. “I hope my cousin’s death is not in vain,” he said.
Michael was one of 17 people killed in a matter of days. By then the provincial health department had counted 165 people with diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting at the hospital and confirmed two dozen cholera cases in the lab. Sandile Buthelezi, the health ministry’s director general, described a “very high fatality rate”.
How it arrived
South Africa’s first cholera outbreak since 2009 began quietly. On 5 February the lab confirmed the country’s first two cases: two sisters from Diepsloot, a township in northern Johannesburg, who had been to a funeral in Malawi, which was then living through its worst cholera outbreak on record. One sister’s husband made it three. Bhekisisa, the health journalism centre, notes that these early cases were imported, while every confirmed case since has been local transmission.
The first death came later, a man of 24 from the Emandleni shacks outside Benoni, who had not travelled anywhere. After that came the baptisms. A couple from Diepsloot fell ill days after being baptised in the Jukskei River, and so did the 50-year-old pastor who performed it. A girl of ten from Katlehong, baptised in the Klip River, tested positive too. The health department later said most positive cases and deaths had links to funeral attendance in affected communities.
Hammanskraal
The weight of the outbreak settled in Kanana, part of Hammanskraal in Tshwane. The first confirmed patient there, diagnosed on 15 May, was a police officer of 65 who had come down from Musina, in Limpopo, for a course at the local college. Jubilee Hospital then reported 48 confirmed cases and 23 deaths, with 229 people seen for diarrhoeal illness, and a field hospital went up in Kanana.
Residents were told not to drink the tap water. Tankers were promised, though residents said the trucks came once or twice weekly. Rosa Kovani, 61, filling a bucket from one with a baby on her back, said: “We don’t have water, we don’t have houses… we have nothing.” Nurses were stretched as well. Mogomotsi Seleke of the nursing union DENOSA said “Nurses only have two hands”, and patients suffer when those hands run out. Locals blame dysfunctional wastewater treatment, poor piping and municipal graft. The government promised a probe.
The Water Research Commission reported in July. Its investigators could not pin the outbreak on river water or tap water. They did find that most local treatment works delivered unsafe drinking water, with plants partly or entirely out of order.
The count
At one stage the health department reported 197 laboratory-confirmed cases in five provinces, plus 848 suspected ones, with a case fatality rate of 3.5%. By the later tally, suspected cases since 1 February had reached 1,073. Deaths stood at 20 among confirmed cases and 27 among suspected ones, 47 in all, three-quarters of them in Gauteng. Gauteng, mostly Hammanskraal, accounted for close to 90% of confirmed infections.
A 24-year-old man admitted in Durban after a trip to Karachi, Pakistan, became the third imported case this year.
Sources
- Here's how cholera spread through SA (Bhekisisa)
- Cholera-Hit South African Town Blames Govt For Deadly Outbreak (AFP via Channels TV)
