The fight to dethrone King Cholera

The fight to dethrone King Cholera

In 1858, Punch magazine published a cartoon showing the figure of Death rowing along the River Thames in London, claiming the lives of cholera victims.

King Cholera no longer has a court in the English capital. But here in Luanda, an overnight thunderstorm heralded his coming as the streets were turned into a muddy quagmire.

"Streets" is something of a strong word to describe the red-dust lanes that weave through the slums of Angola's first city.

Even the main artery that links the port to the civic harbour is little more than a straight country track, paved in a few places, and today choked with cars and lorries pressing for every available bit of space on the slippery mud.

Next to the lunging vehicles, people pick their way past huge mounds of rubbish that mingle with the silt. A few wear Wellington boots. Most are in Brazilian chinelos, or flip flops.

Along this part of the road is a testament to what else the rains bring.

Several agencias funeraria line the street, their doors open to reveal new coffins wrapped in cellophane, ready to go.

Our drive through the flooded streets took us to the Cacuaco slum, and a health centre being run as a partnership between children's charity Unicef and Angola's Ministry of Health.

The rain has kept their usual visitors away. But we go round the corner to where a mother is washing clothes for her family using water collected from buckets under her corrugated metal roof.

Outside her low yard wall, dozens of children gather to take advantage of the chance to wade and play in the floods.

These kids aren't going to be struck down by dipping a toe in.

But many here will be drinking contaminated water when they get home. Many won't wash their hands before eating, and the bacteria will get into their stomach and multiply. Some may get severe cholera. Some may lose too much fluid through diarrhoea and vomiting and die.

The waters also bring mosquitos, and with them another of Angola's big killers, malaria.

Floods like this have caused calamities in the past. In early 2006, more than 1,200 Angolans died of cholera in just three months, with Luanda accounting for about half of the 35,000 who fell ill.

It is easy to picture Punch's "Silent Highwayman" paddling through the slums.

But his catchphrase, "Your money or your life", appears to be being met with the right answer.

This is just the start of 2010's rainy season, which runs to mid-May. Countrywide in 2008, the World Health Organisation recorded 7,740 cases of cholera with 198 deaths. Last year that was down to 681 and three.

Unicef put that down to hundreds of millions of dollars in government investment, with some of that going to the charity's scheme in the slums and a commitment to provide safe drinking water to families, many of whom rely on water brought into the city from rivers.

The message spread by representatives recruited from within each community is simple. Wash properly. Decontaminate your water. And get to hospital at the first sign of symptoms.

It appears to be working. But no one can spend five minutes here without the conviction that the next target for government cash, after the $1 billion spent on the Africa Cup of Nations, has to be basic improvements to the slums themselves. Standard of living is not just about not dying of cholera.

"I'm not a politician, but I am a human and I'm sensitive towards the health problems that we live with," provincial health supervisor Filismena Miguel Neto, part of the Ministry of Health working with Unicef in Cacuaco, told us in Cacuaco.

"I just really hope that that we can unite forces in an effort to change their situation...and that we work hard to focus a lot of attention on our young children."