Haitian capital sees more cholera cases

Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

Health workers feared a surge of cholera cases in the shantytowns and muddy tent camps of Haiti’s capital as suspected cases piled up Tuesday, and a laboratory confirmed cases originated in the overcrowded city.

Hundreds of people suffered the cholera symptoms of fever and diarrhea in hospitals and shacks built along the putrid waste canals of slums such as Cite Soleil and Martissant.

At least 73 cholera cases had been confirmed among people living in Port-au-Prince. Physicians with the aid group Doctors Without Borders reported seeing more than 200 city residents with severe symptoms at their facilities alone over the last three days.

After Monday’s confirmation that a 3-year-old boy from a tent camp near Cite Soleil had contracted the disease before Oct. 31 without leaving the capital, the Pan-American Health Organization said the epidemic’s spread from river towns in the countryside to the nation’s primary urban center was a dangerous development.

At least two more capital-originated cases were confirmed Tuesday at the same hospital where the boy was treated.

Damage to Port-au-Prince’s already miserable pre-earthquake sanitation and drinking-water systems make the city “ripe for the rapid spread of cholera,” Dr. Jon K. Andrus, the organization’s deputy director, told reporters Tuesday.

Port-au-Prince is estimated to be home to between 2.5 million and 3 million people, about half of whom have been living in homeless encampments since the Jan. 12 earthquake ravaged the capital.

A confirmed case of cholera had never been seen in this Caribbean country before last month, when it suddenly killed several dozen people and spread across the agricultural heartland of the Artibonite Valley. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the strain is most similar to those found in South Asia, but no formal investigations have been done to learn how the disease arrived in Haiti.

It has killed more than 580 people and hospitalized more than 9,500, with confirmed cases across the entire northern two-thirds of the country. Dozens of cases are rumored throughout the south.