Health Ministry director Gabriel Timothee said tightly limiting movement of patients and careful disposal of bodies can stave off a major medical disaster.
If efforts to keep cholera out of the camps fail, “the worst case would be that we have hundreds of thousands of people getting sick at the same time,’’ said Claude Surena, president of the Haiti Medical Association. Cholera can cause vomiting and diarrhea so severe it can kill from dehydration in hours.
Doctors Without Borders issued a statement saying some Port-au-Prince residents were suffering from watery diarrhea and were being treated at facilities in the capital. Cholera infection among the patients had not been confirmed, however, and aid workers stressed that diarrhea has been common in Port-au-Prince since the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Aid workers say the risk is magnified by the extreme poverty faced by people displaced by the earthquake, which killed as many as 300,000 people and destroyed much of the capital city. Haitians living in the camps risk disease by failing to wash their hands, or scooping up standing water to wash fruits and vegetables.
“There are limited ways you can wash your hands . . . in slums like we have here,’’ said Michel Thieren, an official with the Pan-American Health Organization in Haiti. “The conditions for transmission are much higher.’’
Aid workers are coaching thousands of impoverished families on how best to avoid cholera. Various aid groups are providing soap and water-purification tablets and educating people in Port-au-Prince’s camps about the importance of washing their hands.
Aid groups also began training more staff about cholera and where to direct people with symptoms. The disease had not been seen in Haiti for decades, and many people don’t know about it.
Members of one grass-roots Haitian organization traveled around Port-au-Prince’s camps booming warnings about cholera from speakers in the bed of a pickup truck.
