Sky News has obtained new evidence of the scale of the cholera crisis sweeping across Zimbabwe. Pictures smuggled out of the country show an emergency clinic swamped by patients and sick people lying untreated in the rural areas. In one small village in the south of the country, one man said his sister's child had already died from the disease and two of his own children were sick. He said the community did not have access to medicines to treat them. Twenty miles away, in the town of Beitbridge, all of the beds are full in a tented cholera clinic set up by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). The small camp offers the only medical help in the area and new patients arrive every hour - many of them by donkey cart. Official figures suggest that at least 589 people have died from cholera. But one patient, treated at a hospital in Harare, said the true death toll was being concealed. "For every 10 patients who die, they report four deaths," the woman, who did not want to be identified, said. She said the conditions in the hospital were filthy, with no clean water and patients lying next to buckets that were being used as toilets. The cholera epidemic has been caused by the collapse of the basic infrastructure of water and sanitation inside Zimbabwe - and exacerbated by crisis in the country's health service. The two main hospitals in Harare have closed because of a shortage of drugs and staff. Many of Zimbabwe's doctors and nurses have abandoned their posts because their monthly salaries do not even cover the cost of their bus fares to work.. One male nurse who is still working said there was a critical shortage of basic medical supplies in the few hospitals that are still operating and are overflowing with cholera patients. "The staff cannot cope, people are dying even before they are being attended to," he said. Most of the population, weak from hunger, are easy prey for what should be an easily preventable and treatable disease. In the rural areas, whole communities have been reduced to foraging for roots and fruits and growing numbers of children are displaying the signs of severe malnutrition. Internationally, the fatality rate for cholera is usually around 1%. In Zimbabwe, it is expected to be many times that. Aid agencies fear the disease may spread to 60,000 people and result in more than 6,000 deaths. They say that Zimbabwe's government, which has declared the crisis a "national emergency", raised the alarm weeks too late. Source: Sky News