HARARE, ZIMBABWE - The advice of doctors to Zimbabweans: Don't get sick. If you do, don't count on hospitals -- they're short of drugs and functioning equipment.

As the economy collapses, the laboratory at a main 1,000-bed hospital has virtually shut down. X-ray materials, injectable antibiotics and anticonvulsants have run out.

Emergency resuscitation equipment is out of action. Patients who need casts for broken bones must bring their own plaster. In a country with one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, medical staff lack protective gloves.

Health authorities blame the drying up of foreign aid under Western sanctions imposed to end political and human rights abuses under President Robert Mugabe. A power-sharing agreement aimed at bringing the opposition into the government could open the gates to foreign aid. But negotiations have stalled over how much power will rest with Mugabe.

Meanwhile, the economic meltdown is evident in empty store shelves, long lines at gas stations -- and hospitals where elevators don't work and patients are carried to upper wards in makeshift hammocks of torn sheets and blankets.

Jacob Kwaramba, an insurance clerk, brought his brother to Harare's Parirenyatwa hospital, once the pride of health services in southern Africa. Emergency room doctors sent Kwaramba to a private pharmacy to buy drugs for his brother's lung infection. He returned two hours later to find his brother dead, he told the AP in the emergency room.

"I couldn't believe it. It wasn't a fatal illness," he said.

A report by six independent Zimbabwean doctors indicates the scale of the collapse.

"Elective surgery has been abandoned in the central hospitals, and even emergency surgery is often dependent on the ability of patients' relatives to purchase suture materials from private suppliers," it said.

"Pharmacies stand empty and ambulances immobilized for want of spare parts ... this is an unmitigated tragedy, scarcely conceivable just a year ago."

The doctors who compiled the six-page report, which was circulated among aid and development groups, withheld their names because comments seen as critical of Mugabe are a punishable offense.

In an interview this year, Health Minister David Parirenyatwa said lack of foreign currency due to sanctions was hindering efforts to maintain equipment. But political violence has added to the burden. The human rights group Amnesty International said hospitals ran out of crutches for victims of attacks blamed on Mugabe's forces.

The independent Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, an alliance of human rights campaigners, said doctors and medical staff were chased from rural clinics to keep them from helping opposition supporters. Many city hospitals couldn't cope with the number of patient injuries sustained in beatings and torture blamed mostly on militants of Mugabe's party and police and soldiers, the group reported.

No data are available on how many lives have been lost because of the medical crisis, but the report said hospital admissions declined sharply because of the cost of treatment and transportation over long distances to clinics and hospitals.

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.