Cholera in Zimbabwe
Diarrhoea and death sweeps through the people of Zimbabwe and the UK is in a uniquely constipated position. With our colonial history lurking in the shade we strain and push against the Mugabe stool.
Gordon Brown, a man who most days looks in need of a purgative, huffs and puffs as he tries to encourage those with the real clout. Nick Clegg has been less diplomatic (as befits a man unlikely to ever see real power) and called for the UN to send in the troops. The international community seems to be slowly screwing up its courage to act decisively. Every time I hear Nick Clegg he refers to Mugabe’s accomplices as henchmen. A great word, underused in my opinion, and one that is not heard often enough in international political discourse.
Many medics will recall John Snow (not the Channel 4 journalist one) and the cholera epidemics of London when cholera is mentioned. When I hear of cholera I think of the the descriptions of cholera raging through prison camps in the Far East in WWII. The cholera epidemic may be a convenient excuse for the international community to finally grasp the Mugabe nettle but it is a genuinely horrific disease.
Ian Denys Peek was a FEPOW after being taken prisoner after the Fall of Singapore in 1942. He was at Kanyu Camp, Thailand, in July 1943. He describes one experience of cholera in his book, One Fourteenth of an Elephant.
Suddenly the peaceful scene is broken by a cry of intense pain. Our friend Freddie is rolling on the ground doubled up with severe stomach cramps, his arms and legs twitching and jerking as his muscles seize up. Then his body erupts with vomiting and a violent forced rush of fluid from his bowels, whitish-fluid the colour of rice-water. We have seen this before, it is cholera without a doubt, but this attack is unusually ferocious and sudden, the fluid forced in hard jets out of his body by the fierce bunching of his muscles, agonisingly painful.
They buried Freddie where he died.
We dig in clean ground close by and tip Freddie’s contorted body into the grave, cover him up and scatter fire all around. It has not taken long – he was alive and talking to us an hour ago.
