The overall health situation in Zimbabwe, which is suffering from its worst-ever cholera epidemic, is "quite worrying," a senior United Nations health official said on Friday.

Medical staff are basically not going to work because their salaries are too low, the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Disease Control and Emergency Operations Coordinator Dominique Legros told a news conference in Geneva.

"I have seen hospitals that were basically empty ghost hospitals, with no material, no staff," said Legros, who has just returned from Zimbabwe where more than 20,500 people have been infected with cholera in an epidemic which broke out in September.

"Something we have to fix quickly is the discrepancies in salaries," Legros said.

"There are government staff being paid government wages which were very little in practice, and staff working for non-governmental organizations with much higher wages. We have to fix that and get incentives for staff to work in the health facilities," he added.

That is the priority if they are to save lives and improve the quality of care, Legros emphasized.

The UN is planning for a worst-case scenario of 60,000 cholera cases in Zimbabwe before the end of the rainy season, based on an estimate that half of the country's population is potentially at risk.

(Xinhua News Agency December 21, 2008)