TESTS done at private laboratories to ascertain the cause of 12 deaths and illness to more than 1 500 residents of Luveve in Bulawayo have revealed that they suffered from typhoid and dysentery.
The revelations come after the city council last week said patients suffered from gastrointestinal diseases.
Gastrointestinal disease is a broad term that refers to diseases involving the gastrointestinal tract, namely the oesophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine and rectum, and the accessory organs of digestion, the liver, gallbladder, and pancreas.
Residents have already filed an urgent chamber application at the High Court compelling council to release key information relating to the outbreak and further allow residents to engage independent experts to assess the situation.
City Health Director Dr Edwin Sibanda said stool tests that were done at a Cimas laboratory came out positive for salmonella typhi, the bacteria that causes typhoid and shigella which causes dysentery.
He said council initially did random sampling of testing one in five cases but as the number of cases grew, they resorted to only collecting one in 20 infected people. Dr Sibanda said it would be difficult to pinpoint the exact source of the disease as water tests also done at the same laboratory did not have any traces of the two bacteria.
“We had tests done at a Cimas lab and National University of Science and Technology for both water quality and rectal swabs. While the stool samples came out positive for salmonella typhi and shigella, the six water samples from various sources that include tap water, home containers, wells and streams came out negative.
The patients were exhibiting different symptoms with some vomiting while others had bloody diarrhoea,” he said.
Dr Sibanda said with the source yet to be pinpointed it was critical for people to wash hands frequently with soap to reduce chances of infection.
“The two diseases have different incubation periods, with shigella’s being 12-96 hours while salmonella typhi is between eight to 14 days.
A person could have been infected elsewhere only to show symptoms here and start spreading the disease. Again, maybe the water source could have been infected before we tested and then the bacteria were washed out by the time we were doing tests,” said Dr Sibanda.
Meanwhile, Bulawayo residents under the Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association (BPRA) have filed an urgent chamber application compelling the local authority to release key information relating to the outbreak.
The residents in their application note that the information is vital as they intend on embarking on a class action civil suit against the local authority, alleging that further delays in the release of the information will result in the local authority concealing key evidence.
According to court papers the application is set to be heard at the High Court-The Sunday News
