Cholera spreads in rural Haiti

Associated Press

ST. MARC, Haiti

A cholera epidemic was spreading in central Haiti on Friday as aid groups rushed doctors and supplies to fight the country’s deadliest health crisis since January’s earthquake. At least 150 people have died, and more than 1,500 others are ill.

The first two cases of the disease outside the rural Artibonite region were confirmed in Arcahaie, a town that is closer to the quake-devastated capital, Port-au-Prince.

Officials are concerned the outbreak could reach the squalid tarp camps where hundreds of thousands of quake survivors live in the capital.

“It will be very, very dangerous,” said Claude Surena, president of the Haitian Medical Association. “Port-au-Prince already has more than 2.4 million people, and the way they are living is dangerous enough already.”

Scores of patients lay on the floor awaiting treatment at the St. Nicholas hospital in the seaside city of St. Marc, some of them brushing away flies on mattresses stained with human feces.

One of them, 55-year-old Jille Sanatus, had been there since Thursday night since his son Jordany brought him. A doctor was struggling to stick a needle into his arm.

“He’s completely dehydrated, so it’s difficult. It’s hard to find the vein,” said Dr. Roasana Casimir, who had been working nearly without rest since the outbreak began two days earlier.

Casimir finally penetrated the vein, and fluid from an IV bag began to trickle in, but half an hour later, the father of 10 was dead. Two hospital employees carried the body to the morgue behind the hospital and placed it on the ground for the family to reclaim for a funeral.

Sanatus’ son said the family had been drinking water from a river running down from the central plateau region. Health Minister Alex Larsen said Friday that the river tested positive for cholera.

Imogen Wall, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the sick patients and the contagious remains of the dead are insufficiently quarantined.

“Part of the problem has been people are moving around a lot, and there hasn’t been proper isolation in place at the clinics,” she said.

The sick come from across the desolate Artibonite Valley, a region that received thousands of refugees after the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed as many as 300,000 people and destroyed the capital 45 miles south of St. Marc.

Cholera was not present in Haiti before the earthquake, but experts have warned that conditions are ripe for disease to strike in areas with limited access to clean water.