By Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu
ZIMBABWE’s 2018-19 wet season has begun as several localities and sub-regions have recently received relatively heavy rains.
Rain seasons in sub-tropical and tropical regions are most important to those areas, but they are also periods during which most people there fall sick from one or other water-borne diseases.
One of those ailments is enteric or typhoid fever, an infectious illness that, like cholera, has been recently experienced in some parts of Zimbabwe such as Harare where it claimed some lives.
Typhoid fever should not be confused with typhus fever which is a highly contagious and very often fatal malady.
It can occur either endemically or epidemically, and is also called ‘hospital’, ‘ship’, ‘spotted’ or ‘putrid’ fever.
This article is, however, about typhoid fever, a disease caused bymicroscopic bacilli so tiny that a scientist who discovered them in 1880, a German called Eberth, said when as many as 8 000 were placed end-to-end with 25 000 others they measured only two-and-half centimetres.
He said the bacilli are unicellular and look like links of sausages, and each one of them has flagella, that is to say arms of hairs that enable them to move in fluids.
Typhoid bacilli are said to be able to survive in either stagnant or running water for some six-or-so days and then die out.
They multiply in people’s intestines and urinary ducts and live there for days, weeks or even months, just as they do in water, cesspools as well as in dust and damp top soils during the wet season.
A clean physical environment is not conducive to the propagation of those germs.
They are introduced into would-be victims through the mouth, and their natural home is in human beings.
Most of the typhoid bacteria are found in the alimentary canal in which they produce a poison that causes illness.
Typhoid occurs in extremely large numbers in stools of every typhoid patient.
They multiply very rapidly in water and especially in milk and survive for quite some time even if the milk or water is frozen. However, they die if the water or milk is boiled.
That is why it is most important to boil the water we drink and the milk we consume with our tea or coffee.
In milk, however, they increase at a phenomenal rate.
An English bacteriologist who started an experiment with a small number of only 78 bacilli was surprised that after 24 hours, they had multiplied to 6 000.
After another 24 hours, their number had risen to 10 000 000. He calculated that after one week, the figure would have risen to 440 000 000!
It is advisable to sterilise every vessel used for carrying or storing milk, particularly in the dairy industry.
A story is told in Britain about a woman whose husband was in the dairy business in the early 1900s.
The woman nursed her two friends who were down with typhoid.
She would return home where she handled some of her husband’s milk cans.
About 40 of his customers soon got infected by the terrible disease.
Had she washed her clothing and arms each time after nursing her two friends and before handling her husband’s milk cans, the 40 or so customers would not have been affected.
The number of those who died is not known, but there were some fatalities.
Research into the social histories of a number of European and English towns shows that quite a few of them experienced epidemic outbreaks of typhoid and paratyphoid fevers in the 19th Century because of the consumption of contaminated water.
The German city of Munich in Bavaria had a high typhoid fever mortality rate of 2 024 per million in the 1851-60 outbreak.
That was reduced to 52 during 1891-1900 period after sanitisation of drinking water and milk supplies was carried out.
In Britain, contaminated water caused a typhoid outbreak in Maidstone in 1897.
In a two-month-long period, 1 800 cases of that disease were recorded in the town’s population of 34 000.
A quick investigation showed that the occurrence was a result of consumption of accidentally contaminated water.
A more or less similar occurrence was experienced in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, US, in about the same period.
The maintenance of high hygiene standards is vital to the general welfare of every community.
One effective way of achieving this is to establish ‘community health committees’ that keep an eye on their respective areas.
The committees can meet at least once monthly but may each hold a much bigger meeting for their respective areas once every three months.
Councillors and House of Assembly members should play the leading role in such committees.
The initiative to form and launch such committees should be taken by ordinary community members in the event elected political representatives are reluctant to do so for whatever reason.
Areas, some of whose membes are doctors, nurses and teachers, could urge such professionals to take the lead in such projects.
High and medium density suburbs as well as high rise flats are in much greater need than low density areas for obvious reasons.
There is certainly no doubt that if councillors and House of Assembly members showed practical interest in the physical welfare of their respective wards and constituencies, there could be a great deal of social improvement in Zimbabwe.
It is most regrettable, no, most sad, that on numerous occasions, councillors fail to attend burials of some prominent residents of their wards.
If a disease such as typhoid fever or cholera is reported in a ward, residents and any other relevant persons should summon the councillor concerned to find out if there are any measures being either taken or planned in the ward to correct the situation.
Most Zimbabwean former councillors, House of Assembly members and senators have left the areas they represented without any social, economic or even cultural improvement whatsoever.
In some wards and constituencies, the only additions that occurred during the time of some councillors and House of Assembly members are graves.
The public should benefit from municipal and parliamentary representation not only by means of economic projects, but by being educated about how to create social services infrastructure from which health and educational services can be generated.
Each municipal and parliamentary representative ought to leave his/her respective area a better place than it was when he/she began to lead it.
At the time of publishing this article, one leader who had prominently achieved this in Zimbabwe is Joseph Chinotimba from ZANU PF whose Buhera constituency was very pleased with his work.
Zimbabwe could be a much better country if it had many more Chinotimbas.
Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email, sgwakuba@gmail.com