Cholera-hit Haiti needs nurses, doctors – U.N.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Haiti needs a surge of  foreign nurses and doctors to stem deaths from a raging cholera  epidemic that an international aid operation is struggling to  control, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official said.

About 1,000 trained nurses and at least 100 more doctors  were urgently needed to control the epidemic, which has struck  the impoverished Caribbean nation months after a destructive  earthquake.

The outbreak has killed more than 1,400 Haitians in five  weeks and the death toll is climbing by dozens each day.
“We clearly need to do more,” Valerie Amos, the U.N.’s  Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, told Reuters  in Port-au-Prince during a visit seeking to increase the scale  and urgency of the cholera response.

“But it’s not just money, it’s crucially people, in terms  of getting more doctors, nurses, more people who can help with  the awareness-raising and getting information out there,” she  said in an interview late on Tuesday at the U.N. logistics base  in Port-au-Prince.

The real death toll may be closer to 2,000, U.N. officials  say. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are likely to catch the  disease, they say, and the epidemic could last a year,  complicating an arduous recovery from the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Amos said the United Nations would reach out to countries  and aid organizations with the potential to rapidly supply  medical staff, for example Cuba, which already has about 400  doctors and other health personnel in Haiti.

Despite the health crisis, Haiti is going ahead with  presidential and legislative elections on Sunday, as the United  Nations and aid groups desperately try to drum up more  international funding and support to fight the unchecked  cholera crisis.

Hospitals and treatment centers across the country are  overflowing with cholera patients. Many of the sick are being  treated outdoors, in courtyards and tents.

Additional personnel were urgently needed to run health  information campaigns and help staff oral rehydration units,  which the government and its aid partners are scrambling to set  up across Haiti.

“We have to control the outbreak and we have to bring down  the percentage of people who are dying and we have to do that  as a matter of urgency,” Amos said.
If untreated, cholera, a virulent diarrheal disease, can  kill in hours, but if caught early enough can be easily treated  through rehydration of the infected person.
“I’m being told it hasn’t reached its peak yet, that it  will get worse before it gets better,” Amos said.

‘NOT DOING ENOUGH’
She said Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest state, had  been slammed by multiple successive emergencies this year —  the January earthquake, the cholera outbreak starting in  mid-October, a hurricane that ravaged crops and caused flooding  in early November — putting it high on the priority list of  the U.N. humanitarian mission.

U.N. officials say the international response to an appeal  by the world body for $164 million to fund a scaled-up cholera  response has been insufficient. Amos said her task was to make  sure the international community did not forget about Haiti.

“I will go back with a set of very clear action points …  talking to member states, talking to partner organizations and  saying very clearly to them we’re not doing enough, we have to  do more,” she said.

The World Bank announced in Washington it was preparing a  $10 million cholera emergency grant for Haiti, which would be  used to bolster the surveillance and monitoring capacity of the  country’s health and sanitation authorities.

In Port-au-Prince, representatives of the Inter-American  Development Bank and the Spanish government cooperation agency  also announced a $20 million grant for the cholera response.

Given the billions of dollars that had already been pledged  for Haiti’s earthquake recovery, Amos said it was possible some  members of the international community did not understand why  separate additional funds were needed for the cholera  response.

“Let’s remember: we have fed 1.3 million people (made  homeless by the quake), we have given them access to health  care, we have given them access to education. Until the cholera  outbreak, we hadn’t had a major outbreak of disease,” she said.

“All this in a country devastated by an earthquake where  you lost significant numbers of people who would have been part  of working on the solution,” Amos added.

Much of Haiti’s health infrastructure was shattered by the  Jan. 12 earthquake, which killed more than 250,000 people,  mostly in the capital Port-au-Prince, decimating the ranks of  the government civil service.  Amos said it would take time to solve Haiti’s huge  problems, stressing that even before the earthquake and the  cholera epidemic the country’s health and development levels  were among the lowest in the world. “This kind of an assumption that when there is a disaster,  you can fix it in two or three months, it just isn’t true,” she  said.