Scores of suspected cases in Port-au-Prince’s Cite Soleil district as health workers attempt to control outbreak.
There are increasing fears that a cholera outbreak in Haiti, which has already killed more than 300 people, could take hold in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
"We have been monitoring very closely the spread of this disease and it has been seen to get closer and closer to the capital," Al Jazeera’s Seb Walker, reporting from Port-au-Prince, said.
"Just about 24 hours ago, the UN announced that there were 174 suspected cases in that town [Cite Soleil] that we went to visit."
Health officials have been concerned that the disease, which causes diarrhoea, vomiting and severe dehydration, could reach the city where hundreds of thousands of people are living in makeshift camps following an earthquake in January.
"The appalling sanitation levels of neighbourhoods like Cite Soleil means it’s areas like this which have been the concern ever since this crisis started," Al Jazeera’s Walker said.
"Officials say they still haven’t found confirmed cases of cholera in the metropolitan area, but some doctors say that maybe not the case."
’Very concerning’
A medic at a clinic in Cite Soleil told Al Jazeera that she had treated a young girl who had been admitted to a neighbourhood clinic with an acute case of diarrhoea.
"This is a patient that had never travelled out of Cite Soleil, she was local to the community and had not left, which is very concerning really because a lot of cases throughout the country are actually people who’ve been travelling," Kara Gibson, a doctor at the Samaritan’s Purse Clinic, said.
Health officials warned that the capital should prepare for a possible outbreak and people have been urged to maintain a strict hygiene regime and seek treatment at the first sign of symptoms.
"If cholera spreads in the city, it’s going to be extremely difficult to deal with and many people could die, this is what we are hearing from health officials all the time," Al Jazeera’s Walker said.
Meanwhile, doctors at a clinic in Arcahaie, 30km from Haiti’s capital, said they have treated more than 700 cases in recent days.
"We have isolated the strain that’s been causing these cases and it’s been confirmed as cholera," Ilinska Sanchez Rodriguez, a Cuban doctor, said.
There source of the cholera outbreak has not been confirmed, but the UN has been testing samples from a suspected sewage spill behind a Nepalese peacekeeping base.
Peacekeepers’ denial
UN officials appeared to take away samples from the site on Wednesday, following accusations that the spill could be the source of the cholera outbreak,
Vincenzo Pugliese, a mission spokesman, confirmed on Wednesday that the UN team was testing for cholera - the first public acknowledgement that the 12,000-member force is directly investigating allegations its base played a role in the outbreak, the Associated Press news agency reported.
Our correspondent said that the UN is "categorically denying" that peacekeepers were the cause of the outbreak.
The Nepalese mission strongly denies its base was a cause of the infection.
Pugliese said civilian engineers collected samples from the base on Friday which tested negative for cholera and the mission’s military force commander ordered the additional tests to confirm. He said no members of the Nepalese battalion have the disease.
But local politicians, including a powerful senator and the mayor of Mirebalais, are pointing the finger at the Nepalese peacekeeping base, which is perched above a source of the Meille River, a tributary to the Artibonite River on Haiti’s central plateau.
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