Official: Cholera outbreak is easing

October 26, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

A cholera outbreak showed signs of easing Monday after killing more than 250 people in a sweep through rural Haiti, but experts warned that the earthquake-devastated country’s first bout with the disease in decades is far from over.

Aid groups were joining the government in a race to purify water and warn people throughout the countryside and the capital, Port-au-Prince, where the Jan. 12 earthquake left more than a million survivors in squalid stick-and-tarp camps that are ripe for the waterborne disease.

“The worst part is over, but you can always have a new spike of cholera,” said Health Ministry Director Gabriel Timothee. He said the situation is beginning to stabilize with only six new deaths reported since Sunday.

Haiti, which had not suffered a cholera outbreak in at least 50 years, is the latest developing country to be afflicted by the disease that sickens an estimated 3 million to 5 million people a year and kills 100,000.

It is common in regions such as the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa — an outbreak in Nigeria this year killed at least 1,500 people, according to the United Nations — but it has been rare in industrialized nations for the past 100 years.

The disease, spread through feces-contaminated drinking water or food, leads to vomiting and watery diarrhea which, if not treated, can kill a person within hours. It is preventable with clean water and sanitation, but both can be hard to find in corners of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.