Children walk past a makeshift house at a slum outside a small village in Zimbabwe. (Source: Reuters)

Today on Reuter’s Alertnet.org (another great source for worldly information) there was another story about the Cholera Outbreak in Zimbabwe. Here are the main parts:

Up to 60,000 people in Zimbabwe could be infected with cholera in the worst case if the epidemic spirals further out of control, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.

The known number people with cholera in Zimbabwe stands at 13,960 with 589 deaths, although the true extent of the outbreak which began in August is unclear, according to the U.N. agency.

“The health-cluster assessment in a worst-case scenario is 60,000 cases,” WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told a news briefing in Geneva.

The cholera outbreak is the worst recorded in Zimbabwe, where many patients are unable to reach health centres or if they do, find them unable to provide simple life-saving medicines, it said.

A poor mother with her child

The highly contagious disease is both preventable and treatable under normal circumstances, but Zimbabwe’s health sector has nearly collapsed as a result of the country’s economic crisis.

The rate of fatalities is quite high — 4.5 percent overall and up to 50 percent in some areas — according to the WHO. It says it should be below one percent of cases in any outbreak.

What can you do to help the situation in Zimbabwe?

• World Concern provides limited health and medical services (deworming medication) in Zimbabwe.
  • Donate to Health and medical services
• World Concern does not have a child sponsorship program in Zimbabwe, but you can sponsor a child in Kenya, Africa - a country that’s fairly close geographically to Zimbabwe.