Haiti cholera toll soars past 250

The outbreak of the disease that has already left 250 people dead and more than 3,000 sick is at the doorstep of an enormous potential breeding ground: the squalid camps in Port-au-Prince where 1.3 million earthquake survivors live.

Health authorities and aid workers are scrambling to keep the tragedies from merging and the deaths from multiplying.

Five cholera patients have been reported in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, raising worries that the disease could reach the sprawling tent slums where abysmal hygiene, poor sanitation, and widespread poverty could rapidly spread it.

But government officials said yesterday that all five apparently got cholera outside Port-au-Prince, and they voiced hope that the deadly bacterial disease could be confined to the rural areas where the outbreak originated last week.

“It’s not difficult to prevent the spread to Port-au-Prince. We can prevent it,” said Health Ministry director Gabriel Timothee.

Cholera can cause vomiting and diarrhoea so severe it can kill from dehydration in hours.

The charity aid group Doctors Without Borders issued a statement saying that some Port-au-Prince residents were suffering from watery diarrhoea and were being treated at facilities in the capital city.