The cholera epidemic that is still affecting Mozambique has made it possible to highlight through field work the extent to which the populations receiving support from humanitarian programs do not recognize the situation presented by the epidemiological data. The statistical restitution of a recurring and seasonal problem risks contributing - when the data arrives in the North of the World - to crystallize stereotyped imaginaries of the contexts of rural Africa, implicitly becoming an instrument of justification of mechanisms for the reproduction of dependence on humanitarian aid and political neocolonialisms sometimes inherent to it. During field work in dozens of villages affected by the cholera epidemic, we interacted with local actors at various levels in order to explain the meaning and content of the risk reduction and treatment activities. Discussing with leaders, elderly people, young women and adult men, it emerges how the significance of the health data that generates and legitimizes the health intervention by the health system and its partners is subsumed in community dynamics and contextualized in historical time, thus underlining continuity and disarticulate the emergency mechanism also in its theoretical premises. "Now you will think that we are a sick and undignified community" I was told by a village leader "but we have always had serious cases during the rainy season" The statistical data read by the communities as a "scientist" element that justifies power devices on the part of local institutions and limits the agency of the communities on the basis of a culture audit process which reflects stereotyped imaginaries not free from implicit and perhaps unconscious primitivism on the part of policy decision makers. Medical anthropology as a discipline and key knowledge for a semiotics of quantitative data towards a more appropriate reading of health problems and more horizontal interventions.