PORT-AU-PRINCE – A cholera epidemic in Haiti has killed more than 250 people, the government said yesterday, but the outbreak which has sickened more than 3,000 may be stabilising with fewer deaths and new cases reported over the last 24 hours.
“We have registered a diminishing in numbers of deaths and of hospitalised people in the most critical areas . . . The tendency is that it is stabilising, without being able to say that we have reached a peak,” said Gabriel Thimote, director general of Haiti’s health department.
The accumulated deaths since the cholera outbreak began around a week ago in the earthquake-ravaged Caribbean nation stood at 253, while total cases were 3,015, mostly in central rural regions straddling the Artibonite river.
Mr Thimote said that whereas previously the hospital in Saint-Marc in the Artibonite region was recording deaths by the dozen, 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 12th 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 Geoscienceyesterday said the earthquake may have been caused by an unseen fault and pressure could be building for another quake. Despite the reports of a stabilising 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. UN peacekeepers were erecting cholera treatment centres – 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 Centre province.
The detection of five “imported” cases in Port-au-Prince, involving patients who had travelled south to the city from the central outbreak zone, has raised fears of the virulent diarrheal disease spreading in the capital.
Port-au-Prince’s sprawling, squalid slums and tent and tarpaulin camps, housing some 1.3 million homeless quake survivors is seen as vulnerable to cholera, which is transmitted through contaminated water and food.
“We are planning for the worst-case scenario here . . . we have to be ready for this,” said United Nations humanitarian spokeswoman in Haiti, Imogen Wall. The 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti is helping to put up the treatment centres.
The Pan American Health Organisation, the regional office of the World Health Organisation, said cholera cases had been confirmed in Haiti’s Artibonite and Centre provinces and in the Oest province, where the capital is located.
Suspected cases have also been detected in Nord and Sud provinces. “It is completely normal that it will expand geographically . . . we are preparing in Port-au-Prince and in the rest of the country,” the organisation’s top medical officer in Haiti, Dr Michel Thieren, said.
The strategy was to try to contain the main outbreak points, ramp up prevention measures and be ready to rapidly treat any new infection points that might appear.
“We need to isolate cholera patients,” Dr Thieren said, adding this would limit contagion and relieve pressure on already overwhelmed local hospitals. – (Reuters)