WILKINS Infectious Diseases Hospital was on Thursday forced to close following suspicions that one of its patients was suffering from the deadly Ebola disease.
Wilkins’ medical superintendent, Hilda Bara, tried in vain to pacify the restive patients but was very clear on what was happening.
“We are managing a suspected Ebola case. The decision to shut this hospital down was made in order to protect you from contracting the disease if it is proven that indeed the patient is suffering from Ebola,” she said.
“We would like to ask you to understand the situation and to seek treatment at Beatrice hospital (Nazareth). Those who want to undergo cervical cancer screening should visit their local clinics. We have also sent our nurses to Nazareth and the officials at the institution are aware of the changes so they will assist you.”
Others said they were only left with a days or week’s supply while some had booked to see doctors at the clinic and feared they could not get the same treatment elsewhere.
With the situation increasingly looking desperate Health Minister David Parirenyatwa later told journalists at Parirenyatwa Hospital where he was visiting that there was no need to panic.
“The issue here is that of public health versus public panic. We need to curb that. Let me emphasise that there is still no Ebola in Zimbabwe and we hope there will never be,” he said. “There have been several scares and I think we need to control it by educating not only the public but also our health professionals so that they don’t get scared.
“(The patient) came to this hospital with fever, and high temperature and was vomiting and bleeding but our doctors did malaria tests and she was positive, so she has malaria. To us it’s still a scare.
“We are sending the specimens to South Africa to test the effectiveness of our system, in case we have a case. However we are still treating the case as suspected Ebola while we wait for the results. We don’t have Ebola in Zimbabwe,” Parirenyatwa said.
While Parirenyatwa claimed the suspected Harare Polytechnic student had first been admitted at Parirenyatwa hospital after visiting her home country, DRC, officials at the health institution contradicted the minister.
With social media abuzz with information that the patient was a student at the Harare Polytechnic and was from the central African country, city health director, Prosper Chonzi, could neither confirm nor deny the claims.
“It is highly unlikely that it is Ebola but we have a patient who is at Wilkins, someone from DRC who went to Parirenyatwa Hospital and they thought it was Ebola after she got there with a high temperature, vomiting and some nose bleed and yesterday was her 21st day in Zimbabwe. She was in Lubumbashi which is like 3 000km away from where Ebola is.
“We did rapid malaria tests and she tested positive so we are managing it as malaria but we are using this opportunity to try out the system, in case we have the virus in Zimbabwe,” Chonzi said.
He added: “We have already collected specimen samples to be tested in South Africa. The results will tell us in four hours whether it is Ebola or not, but we have so far ruled out Ebola.
The disease has so far claimed over 3 000 lives in West Africa and has now caused panic in Spain, the United States and Australia.
According to the World Health Organisation, five people are being infected every hour and the figure could double by November.
Questions have been raised over Zimbabwe’s preparedness with intermittent claims of patients having been diagnosed with the virus. All the claims have so far proved to be hoaxes.