The death toll in Haiti’s cholera epidemic has
reached more than 900, the government reported Sunday, as aid groups rushed
soap and clean water to a disaster-wracked population to fight the disease.
The Ministry of Health reported
that as of Friday, there had been 917 deaths and more than 14,600 were
hospitalized with cholera-like symptoms. That is up from the 724 deaths and
11,125 hospitalisations reported a few days before.
The disease has been found in 6 of Haiti’s 10
provinces, known as departments, and is most severe where it originated, in
Artibonite, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the deaths.
Several epidemiologists have said
the disease has not peaked and will likely worsen and break out in other
regions of the country, with United Nations health officials estimating about
270,000 may be sickened in the coming years. Several new cholera treatment
centres are springing up in the capital and other areas.
“The trend is increasing and it is
propagating from department to department,” Roc Magliore, the Ministry of
Health’s epidemiologist, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. He referred
questions to the ministry’s director general, Gabriel Timothee, who could not
be reached.
Hospitals in Port-au-Prince, where more than one million
earthquake refugees live in congested, squalid tent encampments, are
overflowing with patients exhibiting cholera symptoms, and the death toll there
has reached 27. The disease was first reported in the capital on 8 November.
President René Préval, at a
conference on the disease on Sunday in Port-au-Prince,
urged people to wash their hands frequently and drink only potable water, The
Associated Press reported. But even before the earthquake, most of the population
lacked access to clean water and sanitation.
Cholera, a bacteria that thrives in
feces-contaminated water, causes severe diarrhoea and vomiting that can dehydrate
and kill its victims in hours without treatment. The rate of severe cases,
about 30 to 40 percent, is far higher in Haiti than the 25 percent in a
typical outbreak because of extreme poverty, unsanitary conditions and the fact
that cholera has not been there for 40 years.
“When we go around and give advice
about hygiene, they say, ‘Let me have soap, I can’t afford it,’ ” said Leonard
Doyle, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, an agency
that is distributing water purification tablets and cleaning supplies.
On Friday, the United Nations
requested $164 million from humanitarian agencies and donors to put in place a
strategy to help the government respond to the disease. The largest piece of
the plan is $89 million for clean water, sanitation and hygiene.
Officials in the neighbouring
country, the Dominican
Republic, say they are limiting markets on
the border and taking other steps to ensure cholera does not reach that
country, where thousands of Haitians live and work.
A suspected case turned out not to
be cholera, the country’s health minister said Sunday, according to a Dominican
newspaper, Listin Diario, which said the Dominican Republic is prepared to
treat 7,500 to 10,000 cholera patients.
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