PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – The United Nations-led international response to Haiti’s deadly cholera epidemic is “inadequate” and woefully short of funding, aid groups, including the U.N. humanitarian agency, said yesterday.
As the death toll from the epidemic, which is killing dozens of people each day, climbed above 1,180, the huge humanitarian operation in Haiti appeared to be losing the battle against the latest catastrophe to beset the poor Caribbean nation after a devastating earthquake in January.
The spreading epidemic has piled misery on Haiti’s already impoverished and traumatized population as the government prepares to hold national elections on Nov. 28 in an atmosphere of turmoil, including anti-U.N. riots and protests this week. \The government has made no move to postpone the elections for a new president, deputies and senators.
“Despite the huge presence of international organizations in Haiti, the cholera response has to date been inadequate in meeting the needs of the population,” Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, said in a statement.
“There is no time left for meetings and debate — the time for action is now,” MSF head of mission in Haiti Stefano Zannini said, calling on all groups and agencies to ramp up their activities urgently to fight the cholera outbreak. In just over a month, the cholera epidemic has spread to eight of the country’s 10 provinces and some 20,000 people have been treated in hospitals for the diarrheal disease, which can kill in hours through dehydration if not treated quickly.
If people are treated early, they can be easily saved, experts say, adding that speed of response is crucial.
Aid workers have reported patients dying in the streets and on roadsides, or in isolated rural communities, because they were unable to get to hospitals in time to be saved.
The anti-cholera campaign has been complicated by reports — so far rebuffed as inconclusive by the U.N. mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, that U.N. Nepalese peacekeepers brought the disease to Haiti, where it had been absent for 100 years.
Popular fear and anger over the epidemic has turned into violent attacks and protests against the blue-helmeted peacekeepers who are in the country to help Haitians.
Students shouting anti-U.N. slogans set up barricades of burning tires and rocks near the Haiti University Ethnology Faculty in Port-au-Prince on Friday. Police fired in the air to disperse them. The sprawling city was otherwise calm. At least two people were killed and dozens wounded in clashes this week between U.N. troops and rioting cholera protesters, some armed, in the northern city of Cap-Haitien. The violence, which the United Nations blamed on political agitators, disrupted supplies and treatment in the north, which is experiencing a spike in the cholera epidemic. Imogen Wall of the U.N. humanitarian agency, OCHA, said the cholera response operation had so far received only $5 million of the $164 million the United Nations appealed to governments for a week ago to fight the epidemic. “The response is completely inadequate and in this situation where we are against the clock, we urgently need support if we are going to save lives,” she told Reuters. “Cholera is a race against time. If we can get to people, if we have what we need, we should be saving lives,” she said.
MSF criticized what it called critical shortfalls in the cholera response, calling for an acceleration of prevention measures like setting up treatment centers and oral rehydration points near communities, providing safe, chlorinated water, building latrines and safely disposing of waste and bodies.
Wall said 30 cholera treatment centers had been set up, and more were planned, along with oral rehydration stations.
The international relief operation in Haiti, one of the biggest running in the world, had already been criticized for slow progress in helping Haiti recover from the Jan. 12 quake, which killed more than 250,000 people and wrecked the capital.
Wall said the humanitarian operation was already caring for 1.3 million homeless earthquake survivors sheltering in fragile tent and tarpaulin camps in Port-au-Prince, where they were receiving food, water and medical assistance.
