“The worst part is over, but you can always have a new spike of cholera,’’ said the 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 some parts of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
Some of the 1.3 million people living in the capital’s tent camps already fear the worst.
“I’m afraid because the water we’re drinking here is not treated properly. Anytime I drink the water it makes my stomach sick,’’ said Joseph Sidsen Guerry, 20, who lives in the small Jeremie camp in central Port-au-Prince.
Health groups working to keep the disease from spreading beyond the central valley where it emerged last week are focusing on treating the ill, strengthening medical centers with isolation wards, and educating the public about the disease.
“The biggest challenge for us is the amount of misinformation,’’ said Julie Schindall of Oxfam, which trained the host of a radio call-in program to promote good hygiene practices in rural Petit Riviere, near the outbreak’s epicenter in the Artibonite region. “We have to make sure they know what is true and what is not true.’’
Schindall said some Haitians were still drinking from the contaminated Artibonite river because others did so without getting sick.
