'What cholera?' ask residents of Emandleni in Wattville where first cholera death was recorded

While the department of health is doing all it can to contain a cholera outbreak, the community of Emandleni informal settlement in Wattville, Benoni, where the first death was recorded last week, residents are seemingly oblivious to the disease. 

As TimesLIVE visited the area on Wednesday, residents carried on with their lives as usual.

The deceased was a 24-year-old man and most of his neighbours were  unaware he was killed by cholera.

The majority of them said they did not believe there is an outbreak in their area. When TimesLIVE visited, it took hours to find the family home as locals knew nothing about the death.

Onicca Mkhize, who lives just behind the house where the deceased lived, was among those who said she had no idea  that her neighbour had been killed by cholera.  

Health workers have been sent to carry out contact-tracing after the first  death. 

“Nurses came here to ask us questions about our health and checked if we had any diarrhoea in recent days but as you can see, they found us healthy with no problems,” she said.  

Mkhize said she was not concerned about the disease, as she has tap water in her yard. She added that the deceased used to fetch water from her tap there was no tap at his home.  

In other parts of the settlement, residents were carrying on as usual, paying no attention to special precautions regarding hand hygiene, even as they handled food.

A number of residents queued at local fast-food outlets that mostly sold slap chips. Customers were seen walking out of the fast-food joint where they would immediately start  nibbling on their food without washing their hands. 

Others bought boiled mielies from the street vendors — again with no hand hygiene.  

Meanwhile, health workers in orange T-shirts criss-crossed the settlement as they went house to house with the intention of tracing possible contacts of the deceased and possibly detecting other cases.

A health worker said  they had come across a few people with possible cases. They had referred those residents for testing. 

“It's not a big number of referrals but we are getting some possible cases. It's people who have diarrhoea and as a precaution, we refer them for testing,” the health worker said. 

She said what they were finding is that those with no running water in their yards did not properly store their water.

“Some of them are using dirty containers, and some are using containers that don't have lids so there is a high chance of contamination, even though they got it from the tap,” the health worker said. 

 Another resident, Mandla Khumalo, who lives a stone's throw from the home of the deceased said he was also not aware of the confirmed cholera case in their area but said he was not surprised by it.  

“We’ve had a lot of rain this year which I think will definitely leave us with such diseases. As you can see, our streets are muddied and I think that is where it [the cholera] is because we don’t drink water from wells or rivers here. We drink tap water,” Khumalo said

Msaba Mayihambe told TimesLIVE he didn't believe there was a cholera outbreak in his area. 

“What cholera? We have not seen anyone who is sick. Where are those people that they say are sick? They don't live here. Also, when and how did this cholera run from Alexandra where they first detected cases to here?” Mayihambe said.

The first two confirmed cases of cholera were detected in two sisters who had travelled to Johannesburg from Malawi and presented symptoms on arrival. The third confirmed case was the husband of one of the sisters who showed symptoms days later. 

The fourth case that was reported was a 28-year-old man from Alexandra who was treated as an outpatient. Just like the deceased, he had no local or international travel history. He presented himself at the Edenvale Hospital emergency centre with a four-day history of diarrhoea, vomiting and weakness.  

Mayihambe said if there was indeed an outbreak, the whole community should have been sick as they all get water from the same source. “We get water from the same pipes. Why is that cholera choosing to infect some and not others? It's all lies,” he said.  

Another resident, Musa Nkosi, said he doesn't have the luxury of washing his hands frequently. “I don't have a tap where I live so we use water sparingly and washing hands is something that I don't usually do because it would mean I have to make more trips to fetch water,” he said. 

Patrick Adam, who is a tailor in the area, said he had heard in the news that there was a cholera outbreak in his area. 

“I've not come across anyone who is sick, so it's hard to believe it. I don't know but for now, I'll just follow everything that the nurses told us to do. They said we should report to our local clinic should we experience any of the symptoms and they also said we should boil the water we store in containers before drinking it,” he said. 

On Wednesday, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD)  said the total number of confirmed cholera cases in SA, including the one death in Gauteng, stands at six.

According to the NICD, all cases are adults, ranging in age from 19 to 44.

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