Cholera still poses a serious public health threat to hundreds of thousands of Haitians and donor cash is dwindling, Medecins sans Frontieres says
BOGOTA (AlertNet) - Two years after a cholera epidemic swept through Haiti, the disease still poses a significant public health threat to hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in precarious conditions as the government struggles to provide clean water and sanitation amid donor fatigue, the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has said.
Cholera, a water-borne disease, has killed over 7,500 Haitians and infected nearly 600,000 – roughly 6 percent of the Caribbean nation’s population – since the epidemic broke out in October 2010, according to government figures.
In the capital, Port-au-Prince, 370,000 people made homeless by the massive earthquake that hit the country in January 2010 are still living in 541 makeshift camps across the city, according to the latest report from the U.N.’s humanitarian agency, OCHA.
Limited access to clean drinking water and poor sanitation in urban and rural areas means that cholera will continue to pose a public health risk, experts say.
“Tens of thousands more are living in shantytowns, where sanitary conditions remain deplorable, preventing the population from implementing the health measures necessary to protect themselves,” MSF said in a statement on Thursday.
MSF is urging the Haitian health ministry to improve its “extremely low” ability to respond to the ongoing cholera threat and ensure specific cholera treatment is available in government-run hospitals and clinics.
Cholera is an infection that causes severe diarrhoea and can lead to dehydration and death within a few hours. But the disease is easily treated, doctors say, providing patients get adequate treatment and drink clean fluids in time.
In April, the government and international aid agencies started a nationwide oral vaccination campaign to curb cholera and other infectious diseases in Haiti.
But MSF says more needs to be done to prevent the spread of cholera. “This year, MSF had to keep most of our cholera treatment centres open throughout the year because cholera is far from being controlled,” Oliver Schulz, MSF’s head of mission in Haiti, said in a statement.
“The measures to prevent and treat cholera are still not enough,” he said.
So far this year, MSF has treated 12,000 cholera patients in five cholera treatment centres in Port-au-Prince and Leogane, Haiti’s second largest city.
“This is a drop in the numbers, compared with the approximately 35,000 cases that we admitted during the same period in 2011 in Port-au-Prince,” said Schulz. “We continue to see an average of 250 new cases each week in our facilities, this is still a high number.”
OCHA and the Haitian health ministry both point to a steady decrease in the number of new cases since the beginning of this year.
“Cholera is now under control: the downward trend continues throughout the country. However, national capacity to manage a new upsurge in infections remains limited,” said the latest OCHA report on Haiti, which warned that a resurgence of the epidemic is still possible until the end of the rainy and hurricane seasons in November.
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