Fears rise with more cholera deaths in Haiti capital

AFP/File – A boy looks at a man in an ambulance on November 10, at the hospital "Medecins Sans Frontieres" …




by Clarens Renois Clarens Renois – 2 hrs 41 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) – Haiti's cholera crisis deepened on Thursday as the toll soared again and three more deaths in the teeming capital raised fears the epidemic could explode in camps full of [COLOR=#366388 !important][COLOR=#366388 !important]earthquake [COLOR=#366388 !important]survivors[/color][/color][/color]...
Haitian authorities have been warned to expect a different scale of disaster if cholera takes hold in Port-au-Prince, much of which was flattened by a January earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people.
An estimated 1.3 million Haitians live in refugee camps, most in tent cities around the capital where water-borne cholera could spread easily in filthy conditions where scarce supplies are shared for cooking and washing.
The Haitian health ministry says 724 people have now died from the highly contagious disease and the number of infections around the country has passed the 11,000 mark.
The outbreak, Haiti's first in more than 50 years, erupted in the Artibonite River valley in mid-October and initially seemed to have been contained to central and northern areas.
But there have been roughly 1,000 new cases each day this week and the death curve is getting steadily steeper with 60 new fatalities recorded on Wednesday and more than 80 on Thursday.
More worrying still is the fact that three more deaths have been confirmed in Port-au-Prince, which recorded its first fatality from the disease on Tuesday.
"If cholera cases continue to rise at this rate, we'll quickly be overwhelmed," warned Yves Lambert, head of infectious diseases at the main public hospital in central Port-au-Prince...
"Think about all the rural communities in which there are no doctors... no nurses... in which people are dying," said David Walton, a doctor from Boston with 13 years of experience treating patients in Haiti.
"(Cholera) is there and its (infection rate is) much higher. We're just not hearing about it," Walton told CBS's "60 Minutes."

Desperate scenes were described earlier in the week in the major northern town of Gonaives where some 60 people were said to have died with cholera-like symptoms in just a few days.
"Sick people died on the way to the hospital, the bodies were covered in blankets and left near the town cemetery," mayor Adolphe Jean-Francois told AFP...
The Pan American Health Organization, the regional office of the UN's World Health Organization, has warned Haiti to expect hundreds of thousands of cases of cholera over several years now that the disease appears to have taken hold.