Concerns as cholera reaches Haiti capital

THE first “isolated” cases of cholera were reported in the Haitian capital, amid fears yesterday that last weekend’s hurricane rains will hasten the spread of the disease in Port-au-Prince’s squalid refugee camps.

Health Ministry chief of staff Ariel Henry said while there is not widespread infection in the capital so far, a sizeable outbreak here now appears likely, endangering nearly three million people living in Port-au-Prince

“It’s coming,” Henry warned, adding two deaths believed to be caused by cholera were being probed by health officials.

The outbreak has already killed at least 544 people in Haiti, Health Ministry executive director Gabriel Timothee said.

Health authorities fear that cholera could infiltrate the cramped, unsanitary Port-au-Prince camps where hundreds of thousands of people are based.

The Haitian capital for weeks had evaded the epidemic, but Hurricane Tomas appears to have contributed to its arrival here, after the Artibonite River overflowed its banks over the weekend.

Tomas barrelled into Haiti on Friday, bringing torrential rains and packing winds up to 135km per hour.

In the end, the capital was spared the brunt of the storm, but Tomas submerged coastal towns like Leogane in floodwaters, triggered dangerous mudslides inland and wiped out roads and bridges, completely cutting off some rural communities from help.

Even worse hit was the southwestern department or region of Grand’Anse, where eight people were killed by Tomas. Nearly 900 Haitian homes were destroyed nationwide and another 5,000 damaged as the huge storm skirted past.

As the storm approached, thousands of displaced people scrambled onto buses to evacuate the refugee camps around Port-au-Prince.

But even in the best of times, much of Haiti’s population of just under 10 million live in precarious conditions, vulnerable to natural disasters, after mountainsides have been stripped of trees to be used as fuel, increasing the risk of landslides.

Tomas was just the latest in a series of heavy blows for besieged Haiti in the wake of January’s quake that killed 250,000 people and left more than a million homeless – many of them forced to live in the country’s fetid tent cities.

Now the cholera epidemic, in addition to causing hundreds of deaths in Haiti’s provinces, has sent more than 8,000 people to the hospital.

Although easily treated, the water-borne bacterial disease has a short incubation period and causes acute diarrhoea that can quickly lead to severe dehydration and death.