Cholera outbreak death rate down Haiti

Haiti (AP):

A cholera outbreak that has killed more than 250 people in rural Haiti is stabilising, health officials said yesterday, as aid groups and the government race to prevent it from spreading to the capital's squalid camps of earthquake survivors.

The outbreak was expected to continue spreading, but aid groups and the government said a drop in the death rate and the number of new cases suggested it could progress more gradually than feared.

"The situation is beginning to stabilise. Since yesterday (Sunday) we have registered only six new deaths," Health Ministry Director Gabriel Timothee said at a news conference.

Officials said no cases have originated in the capital, Port-au-Prince, where authorities fear abysmal hygiene, poor sanitation and widespread poverty could rapidly spread the disease through the sprawling tent slums erected after the January 12 earthquake.

Five patients were diagnosed with cholera here over the weekend, but officials said they got sick outside the capital.

As part of the effort to slow the spread of the disease, Timothee said the government has asked for garbage to be removed around the camps of homeless.

If efforts to keep cholera out of the camps fail, "The worst case would be that we have hundreds of thousands of people getting sick at the same time," said Claude Surena, president of the Haiti Medical Association. Cholera can cause vomiting and diarrhea so severe, it can kill from dehydration in hours.

Doctors Without Borders issued a statement saying that some Port-au-Prince residents were suffering from watery diarrhoea and were being treated at facilities in the capital city. Cholera infection among the patients had not been confirmed, however, and aid workers stressed that diarrhoea has not been uncommon in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake.

Aid workers in the impoverished nation say the risk is magnified by the extreme poverty faced by people displaced by the quake, which killed as many as 300,000 people and destroyed much of the capital city. Haitians living in the camps risk disease by failing to wash their hands, or scooping up standing water and then proceeding to wash fruits and vegetables.