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Cholera, as people in Harare know to their cost from two previous runaway outbreaks, can spread very quickly and is no respecter of social status or wealth, only of hygiene and cleanliness.

The present outbreak in Harare shows this quite starkly. The most affected suburbs at present are Budiriro, Glen View, Dzivaresekwa, Mount Pleasant, Mbare and Waterfalls, a full range of communities across the city from one of the poorest to one of the richest.

So obviously we all need to be alert and need to take care. No one is exempt. No one can pretend to be exempt.

Yesterday, the alert level was raised. Harare Metropolitan Provincial and Devolution Permanent Secretary Mr Tafadzwa Muguti directed the four urban authorities in his province to immediately close down the unlicenced food outlets that have erupted in open spaces, under trees, along the sides of some suburban roads and even in car parks.

These outlets have no water, no wash basins, no in-house bathrooms and generally are a risk to their customers and those who are near to them.

Vendors can be considered a town planning nuisance, and there are ways they can be legalised, but food outlets need to follow health regulations.

It is not a case of being unkind to micro-businesses: it is a case of preserving the general health of whole communities.

Mr Muguti will be aware, since he has been in that post for some years, that giving such a directive, presumably on the advice of every public health professional in the province, will not imply action.

Harare and Chitungwiza municipalities are notorious for their lackadaisical attitude to almost every law and regulation, and while Epworth and Ruwa area boards show a lot more enthusiasm, they have limited resources.

So the province will need to prod some hard, and help others enforce the law.

At present, curiously enough, it is Harare city that is the affected local authority but since the four authorities are so close, and in several cases backyards of residents in one authority are separated by a garden wall or fence from backyards in another, the other three cannot just sit back.

This is particularly true when we consider that Harare City Council owns both water treatment works in the province and, to a large degree, is responsible for a large part of the potential health disaster.

The supply dams filled in the past rainy season, so there is no shortage of raw water.

However, the water treatment works are operating at around half of the installed capacity, thanks to two decades of negligible maintenance and there has been zero increase in their capacity.

Reservoirs have been closed along the distribution lines.

Harare, Chitungwiza and Ruwa have proper sewer systems. Low density suburbs mostly use septic tanks in the property holders’ backyards, but the rest of the housing and commercial areas are  supposed to be connected to the mains sewers.

The abdication of responsibility, especially by Harare and Chitungwiza in recent years, allowed the land barons to carve up public land and sell it off, without sewers and water pipes.

Creating one major problem.

It is probably worth noting that the only province that has had no cholera cases in the present outbreak is Bulawayo, which is Bulawayo City Council. The main reason is easy to work out.

Bulawayo residents are short of water, but this is because of the shortage of raw water; the small dams for that city do not hold enough although the city is due to start receiving adequate flows next year with the pipeline from Gwayi-Shangani opens.

But Bulawayo has a proper rationing policy, with everyone knowing which days of the week and at what times they will get water. So the city it a lot healthier.

Harare and its satellite towns have areas which never get water, areas which get water one a week, most weeks if not every week, and areas which do better. There appears little rhyme or reason how the areas are chosen.

Covid-19 should have taught everyone how important basic hygiene is, and the fact that we got through that epidemic without that high a cost shows that a lot of people not only lined up for their free vaccines, but also kept themselves clean and washed their hands more frequently.

Some appear to have forgotten how to do that. We all need to remember.

Cholera is a lot simpler to treat than Covid-19 or many other potentially fatal illnesses. It is caused by a bacterium, so antibiotics work rather fast.

People who fall ill still need to tell someone, so they can be given treatment, but once in the hands of the doctors and nurses you basically will live.

We learned in 2008 during a runaway epidemic that you cannot ignore or semi-ignore an outbreak. So in 2018, right after the last elections, the Second Republic showed its metal when the Government moved swiftly with resources to help Harare cope with another runaway epidemic, very successfully.

Now we face another runaway epidemic, and this time, at least at this stage, the main thrust is to stop people falling ill in the first place, and then back that prevention up with the greatly enhanced public health system curing the small numbers who manage to fall ill.

Already Mr Muguti has announced that as a focus for each community outbreak is identified teams will be moving in swiftly to block the source, in most cases by closing a shallow well that became contaminated.

As we report today, there are also other problems in some areas from religious communities which reject all medical services.

But even here there are ways. In the latter stages of the liberation war cholera outbreaks were seen in some of the fenced villages and close-by areas.

Medical staff who had remained committed to serving human beings, rather than becoming military servants, reacted by dropping a chlorination tablet, normally used in swimming pools and so safe for humans, into every well. It worked.

Something better and more precise to protect the water in a shallow well could now be employed, and doses worked out with the right chemicals to kill the bacteria with zero risk to humans and animals. Some people will otherwise continue to take risks and it is very difficult to stop someone using a shallow well, or even clearing out the rubble if the authorities fill it in.

Meanwhile, we all need to be reminded how easy it is to avoid cholera, with decent hygiene, but that as always in public health it needs everyone to co-operate.