Steven Lang
GRAHAMSTOWN, May 26 2008 (IPS) – Located high in the Drakensburg Mountains of the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa, Sterkspruit is a picturesque rural area that includes several tribal villages. In the midst of this natural beauty, however, a tragedy has been unfolding over recent months.
Mike Waters, spokesman on health matters for the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), claims that 142 babies in the region have died as a result of drinking contaminated water. Provincial health authorities have only acknowledged 78 deaths.
Most seriously affected are villages in Sterkspruit and the town of Barkly East in the Senqu municipality.
Health problems among villagers began to appear last October after aging equipment in the water treatment works at Barkly East broke down due to a lack of maintenance.
The failure of chlorination pumps meant that chemicals had to be added to the water manually. However, the employee who was supposed to do this was not always on hand to perform the task, and since he did not have proper training it is suspected that he might not have added enough chemicals to purify the water consistently. This apparently resulted in water contaminated with E. Coli bacteria flowing into the distribution system.
By January, the number of infants admitted to local hospitals with diarrhoea had increased dramatically. Hospital officials and local doctors, who did not wish to be identified, said contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation were responsible for the outbreak of diarrhoea that proved fatal to many infants.
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They also accused the municipal authorities of being slow to alert the public to the dangers of drinking the local water. While the rise in infant mortality was reported as far back as January, the municipality waited until the middle of April to start warning the public.
In a statement released earlier this month, Mpowele Swathe, a member of parliament for the DA, accused government of an inadequate response to the situation, saying its actions appeared to have been focused entirely on preventing anyone from being held accountable for the problem rather than on solving it.
Municipal administrators say that local hospitals were at fault because they did not alert the authorities in time for an appropriate investigation. They also say the hospitals did not do proper tests on stool samples, that would have enabled health officials to identify the cause of death.
However, hospital staff have flatly rejected these accusations, saying they reported the upsurge in infant mortality but that the municipality did nothing until 15 babies had died.
Eastern Cape Premier Nosimo Balindlela, speaking to the media the day after the first articles about the crisis were splashed onto the front pages of provincial newspapers (last month), expressed her horror at the needless loss of young lives. Her apparent surprise caused some journalists to wonder why she did not know about the outbreak before it was revealed in the press.
Balindlela immediately dispatched a task team made up of officials from the national Department of Water Affairs and Forestry and both the national and provincial health departments to the Senqu municipality to investigate the deaths.
The team did tests on water from taps and reservoirs and inspected the Cloete Joubert Hospital in Barkly East and the Empilisweni Hospital in Sterkspruit.
While the task team was carrying out its investigations it also did some hygiene education, teaching villagers about the value of boiling water and adding bleach to drinking water.
The team s interim report on the infant deaths was presented to a closed session of the Executive Council of the Eastern Cape government in the first week of this month.
The report has not been released to the public. However, IPS was able to ascertain that it acknowledges systematic failures affecting water quality as being among the main factors prompting the diarrhoea outbreak: it noted that there was a high count of E Coli bacteria in the water, suggesting that faecal matter had leaked into the water system.
The multiplicity of causes behind the fatal outbreak also included local officials allowing the matter to get out of control: The district managers never brought this information to the attention of the health authorities at head office, so the provincial office was not aware of this.
The report further highlights the fact that all those who fell victim to illness lived in poor socio-economic conditions. More than 83 percent of the affected families did not have toilets in their homes, so they had to use outside pit latrines that are prone to allowing leakage of untreated water into the ground water system.
According to the document, which was later submitted to the national health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, almost 50 percent of babies admitted with diarrhoea between January and March this year died within 24 hours of admission. The report says this high mortality rate occurred because many of the patients were only brought to the hospitals when they were in a critical state.
After receiving the report, Tshabalala-Msimang reportedly said told a press briefing at parliament that the authors should re-write it as they had missed the point. She did not elaborate on how she wanted it to be re-written.
Meanwhile, certain key provincial health authorities are still reluctant to acknowledge the gravity of the outbreak. Provincial Health Superintendent General Lawrence Boya said at a meeting held earlier this month in Barkly East that the dramatic upturn in waterborne disease was nothing more than a seasonal increase apparent across the country. He also refused to describe the situation as a crisis.
The diarrhoea outbreak in the Eastern Cape echoes developments elsewhere in South Africa that have seen technical staff abandon careers in local government, prompting a critical skills shortage in the management of water supplies that has led in turn to serious illnesses and even death (see HEALTH-SOUTH AFRICA: Too Few Trained Personnel. Too Much Aluminium? and SOUTH AFRICA: A Tale of Ongoing Water and Sanitation Woes ).
In her budget speech delivered to parliament on Friday, Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Lindiwe Hendricks acknowledged this countrywide problem, saying that national government would intervene where municipalities were not able to supply potable water to residents.
She said that six percent of mainly rural municipalities were currently not fulfilling their mandate with respect to water supplies.
