The advice of doctors to Zimbabweans is: Don’t get sick. If you do, don’t count on hospitals — they are short of drugs and functioning equipment.
As the economy collapses, the laboratory at a main 1,000-bed hospital has virtually shut down. X-ray materials, injectable antibiotics and anticonvulsants have run out.
Emergency resuscitation equipment is out of action. Patients needing casts for broken bones need to bring their own plaster. In a country with one of the world’s worst AIDS epidemics, medical staff lack protective gloves.
Health authorities blame Western sanctions imposed to end political and human rights abuses under Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
The economic meltdown is evident in hospitals, where elevators don’t work and patients are carried in makeshift hammocks of torn sheets and blankets.
Jacob Kwaramba, an insurance clerk, brought his brother to Harare’s Parirenyatwa hospital, once the pride of health services in southern Africa. Emergency room doctors sent Kwaramba to a private pharmacy to buy drugs for his brother’s lung infection. He returned two hours later to find his brother dead.
“I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t a fatal illness,” he said.
Another family said a relative dying of cancer was sent home and no painkillers could be found in pharmacies. Relatives abroad were able to pay for morphine, but by the time import clearance was obtained, the man had died in agony, the family said.
A report by six Zimbabwean doctors details the collapse.
“Elective surgery has been abandoned in the central hospitals and even emergency surgery is often dependent on the ability of patients’ relatives to purchase suture materials,” it said.
“Pharmacies stand empty and ambulances immobilized for want of spare parts ... this is an unmitigated tragedy, scarcely conceivable just a year ago,” it said.
The doctors who compiled the report for circulation among aid and development groups withheld their names for fear of reprisal.
Political violence has added to the burden. Amnesty International said hospitals ran out of crutches for victims of attacks blamed on Mugabe’s forces.
The Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, an alliance of human rights campaigners, said medical staff were chased from rural clinics to keep them from helping injured opposition supporters, while many city hospitals couldn’t cope with the number of injuries in beatings and torture blamed on Mugabe’s party, police and soldiers.
The report said that a decade ago Zimbabwe had the best health system in sub-Saharan Africa. But with the crisis worsening, 10,000 Zimbabwean nurses are employed in Britain alone and 80 percent of Zimbabwean medical graduates work abroad.
The elite go for care abroad, mostly to South Africa, but also to Asia. Mugabe has his checkups in Malaysia.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS