Cholera Outbreak in Haiti
Posted on 25. Oct, 2010 by thanate in cholera, Epidemic, News
A cholera outbreak that already has left 250 people dead and more than 3,000 sickened is at the doorstep of an enormous potential breeding ground: the squalid camps in Port-au-Prince where 1.3 million earthquake survivors live. Health authorities and aid workers are scrambling to keep the tragedies from merging and the deaths from multiplying.
Photo: Ramon Espinosa / AP
Five cholera patients have been reported in Haiti’s capital, heightening worries that the disease could reach the sprawling tent slums where abysmal hygiene, poor sanitation, and widespread poverty could rapidly spread it. But government officials said Sunday that all five apparently got cholera outside Port-au-Prince, and they voiced hope that the deadly bacterial disease could be confined to the rural areas where the outbreak originated last week.
Thimote said that whereas previously the hospital in Saint-Marc in the Artibonite region was recording deaths by dozens, it had registered only one on Saturday.
The epidemic is the second emergency to strike the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere this year. A catastrophic January 12 quake killed up to 300,000 people in Haiti, which is only a two-hour flight from the United States.
Scientific papers published by seismology experts in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday said the January earthquake may have been caused by an unseen fault and pressure could be building for another quake.
Despite the reports of a stabilizing trend in the cholera outbreak, foreign aid agencies were preparing for a possible worst-case scenario of the epidemic spreading across the country, including the densely populated capital.
U.N. peacekeepers were erecting cholera treatment centers — structures large enough to treat 150 cases each — in the main outbreak region of Artibonite, in the overcrowded capital Port-au-Prince and in the Center province.
The detection of five “imported” cases in Port-au-Prince, involving patients who had traveled south to the city from the central outbreak zone, has raised fears of the virulent diarrheal disease spreading in the capital.
Photo: AFP
Experts see Port-au-Prince’s sprawling, squalid slums and tent and tarpaulin camps housing some 1.3 million homeless quake survivors as vulnerable to the cholera, which is transmitted through contaminated water and food.
Aid workers in the impoverished nation say the risk is magnified by the extreme poverty faced by people displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake, which killed as many as 300,000 Haitians and destroyed much of the capital. Haitians living in the camps risk disease by failing to wash their hands, or scooping up standing water and then proceeding to wash fruits and vegetables.
Aid workers are coaching thousands of impoverished families how best to avoid cholera. Various aid groups are providing soap and water purification tablets and educating people in Port-au-Prince’s camps about the importance of hand-washing.
Aid groups also began training more staff about cholera and where to direct people with symptoms. The disease had not been seen in Haiti for decades, and many people don’t know about it.
Members of one grass-roots Haitian organization traveled around Port-au-Prince’s camps booming warnings about cholera from speakers in the bed of a pickup.
Sources: msnbc.msn.com, news.yahoo.com, washingtonpost.com
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