PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – The death toll from a cholera epidemic in central Haiti topped 200 yesterday as the government and its aid partners doubled efforts to stop the disease from reaching the crowded, earthquake-ravaged capital.
With more than 2,300 cholera cases reported and experts predicting the numbers will rise, Haitian and international medical teams are working desperately to isolate and contain the epidemic in the Artibonite and Central Plateau regions.
These are north of the sprawling and rubble-strewn capital Port-au-Prince, with its squalid slums and around 1.3 million survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake packed into tent and tarpaulin camps. All are highly vulnerable to a virulent diarrhoeal disease like cholera.
It is the worst medical emergency to strike the poor, disaster-prone Caribbean nation since the earthquake killed up to 300,000 people and is also the first cholera epidemic in Haiti in a century.
Haitian health officials told a news conference yesterday that 194 people had died from cholera in the Artibonite region, the main outbreak zone, with another 14 deaths in neighbouring Central Plateau.
There are nearly 2,400 cases in all and affected places included a prison in Central Plateau.
United Nations and Haitian officials have stepped up disease prevention measures and surveillance of the camps housing people displaced by the earthquake while rushing doctors, medicine and water supplies to the affected areas.
