Haiti cholera death toll tops 250
More than 250 people have been killed in an outbreak of cholera which hit the Haitian capital at the weekend, but the government says a multinational response has slowed the epidemic.
A senior UN official warned that the spread of the disease if likely to widen in the country which has been struggling to rebuild after the catastrophic earthquake in January.
“We must gear up for a serious epidemic, even though we hope it won’t happen,” Nigel Fisher, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, said.
More than 3,000 cholera cases have been reported so far in the poor Caribbean nation. The UN, Haiti’s government and aid partners have launched a major effort to try to contain the epidemic.
Disease slowing
Cholera treatment centres have been set up to isolate patients in two of the worst affected areas, Artibonite and Centre, and in the capital Port-au-Prince. The main outbreak areas straddle the Artibonite River watershed, suspected of being the main propagator of the deadly disease.
“We have registered a diminishing in numbers of deaths and of hospitalized people in the most critical areas,” Gabriel Thimote, director-general of Haiti’s Health Department, told a news conference.
“The tendency is that it is stabilizing, without being able to say that we have reached a peak.”
With a number of confirmed cases in Port-au-Prince and suspected cases reported in the town of L’Arcahaie and in the country’s northern second city of Cap-Haitien, Fisher said the expectation was that the outbreak would spread geographically.
'Everyone's on high alert'
Oxfam's Julie Schindall, who has been in Haiti since March, said Oxfam has mobilised extra specialists to set up water, sanitation and hygiene programmes for the charity’s assigned zone – a habitat of 100,000 people.
Ms Schindall told Channel 4 News that with the source of the outbreak still unknown, aid workers have to move quickly to contain it.
She fears the spread of cholera could be spurred on by the celebration of a public holiday in Haiti at the beginning of November.
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Accumulated deaths since the cholera outbreak began around a week ago stood at 253, while cases totalled 3,015, mostly in the Artibonite region, Haitian health authorities said.
President Rene Preval on Sunday visited Saint-Marc, the coastal town at the centre of the Artibonite outbreak zone whose hospital had been overwhelmed with patients suffering the acute diarrheal disease that can kill in hours through dehydration. It is transmitted by contaminated water and food.
Health workers were distributing kits of soap bars, water purification tablets and oral rehydration sachets to people on the Artibonite River watershed and also in Port-au-Prince.