15 November 2010 | News | Human rights
Growing Cholera Outbreak
Cholera death toll grows in Haiti, worsening the country’s humanitarian crisis
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More than 900 people died in the cholera outbreak in Haiti, which has hit the country for over three weeks. The local health authorities say that nearly 14,600 people have been treated with symptoms of the illness in six of the ten departments of the country, while the public health care centers and humanitarian medicine organizations have been flooded by the fast increase in the people affected by the disease.
Cholera is contracted through dirty water and causes severe diarrhea and vomit. It is estimated that the cholera outbreak was caused by one of the United Nations contingents in Haiti, Minustah, when Nepali soldiers left their feces in a tributary of the Artibonite river, which led to the infectious outbreak. This hypothesis is also backed by the fact that the strains researched by the Haitian Ministry of Health are very similar to the ones found in the South of Asia.
The disease adds to the bad conditions that the population of Haiti was already suffering as a result of the earthquake that hit the country at the beginning of the year, which had worsened the extreme poverty in the country. Now, cholera is another humanitarian problem that affects the Haitians.
Some humanitarian medicine organizations in Haiti are Doctors of the World, Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health. These organizations are overstretched, so they are asking for donations on their websites to extend the number of beds available.
Democracy Now! Reported that the United Nations warns that some 270,000 Haitians could fall ill in the coming years, so they have appealed for some $160 million in new aid.
As of July of this year, the Haitian authorities had only received 2% of the nearly 10 billion dollars promised by the international community to help in the country’s reconstruction.
