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Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Haiti is seeing a jump in the number of cholera cases as the Caribbean nation heads
into the annual rainy season, a United Nations humanitarian agency said.
The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the new cholera
cases were found in the western and northern parts of the country and that Haitian
health officials recorded 77 new cases a day for the whole country in early March,
when the rains began.
Medical teams have been deployed to stem the spread of cholera but their
effectiveness has been hampered in part by little coordination and an absence
of salaries paid to people working in cholera treatment centres run by Haitian
authorities, the UN bulletin said.
The disease, now the largest cholera outbreak in the world, has killed more than
7000 people and sickened another 530,000, health officials say. The disease was
likely introduced by a UN peacekeeping unit from Nepal, where the disease is
endemic, several months after the January 2010 earthquake. |
