Over 800 dead in Haiti cholera epidemic, 200,000 at risk

More than 800 have died in the cholera epidemic in Haiti, 12,000 have been hospitalized, and some 200,000 people are at risk, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announced Friday, issuing an appeal for $164 million in emergency aid.

The epidemic was first reported three weeks ago and it has spread to both Gonaives, Haiti’s fourth largest city, and to the capital, Port-au-Prince, where more than 1.3 million people live in tent encampments established after last January’s catastrophic earthquake, which killed an estimated 250,000.

A doctor with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said Friday that cholera epidemic was taking off in Port-au-Prince. “It’s a really worrying situation for us at the moment,” he told Agence France Presse. “All hospitals in Port-au-Prince are overflowing with patients and we’re seeing seven times the total amount of cases we had three days ago.”

In the capital, the disease is centered in Cite Soleil, a slum on the north side which is closest to the road from the Artibonite valley, where the outbreak began last month. MSF recorded 216 cases of cholera in Cite Soleil Thursday, a ten-fold increase over the beginning of the week.

“If the number of cases continues to increase at the same rate, then we’re going to have to adopt some drastic measures to be able to treat people,” the MSF doctor said. “We’re going to have to use public spaces and even streets.”

The OCHA estimate that up to 200,000 will show some symptoms of the disease was worked out in conjunction with the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control. There is no recent precedent for an outbreak on such a scale in the western hemisphere.


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/hait-n13.shtml

:(

The international aid promised, a substantial amount of which appears to have been lip service, is in urgent need there.

Smiling while being handed her new UN job as a Hatian ambassador (or some darn thing) at a dinner in Paris. Just the optics of that are shocking.

the cameras were on, but the aid has not been delivered.

The media swoops in when a crisis is "fresh", but as soon as the "story" starts to get a little "stale", they move on to the next thing:(

Disgraceful, heinous, appalling, such are the priorities of the Capitalist state. Neglect of the poor, business as usual.

UN workers introduced cholera to haiti - it is not endemic there. (BTW, it was unintentional - Nepalese "peacekeepers" had it - cholera is endemic in Nepal.)

plenty of blame to go around.