 The collapse of these systems was blamed on the then-current economic crisis; many households cannot afford fuel to boil water.According to Médecins Sans Frontières, the spread of cholera from urban to rural areas from December 2008 onwards was due to infected city-dwellers visiting their families' rural homes for Christmas and the burial of infected city-dwellers in rural areas.The 2008 cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe had an unusually high fatality rate; Oxfam attributed the high mortality to a population "seriously weakened by hunger, HIV and AIDS".