Cuba battling Havana cholera outbreak
“Fifty-one cases have been confirmed to date,” the statement read, without mentioning fatalities.
“Due to the measures adopted transmission is in the phase of extinction,” it said.
But in off-the-record discussions with a ministry official and doctor directly involved in fighting the outbreak, a different picture emerged with hundreds of suspected cases.
They said the first cases were traced to a baseball game at the Latin American Stadium in the Cerro municipality of the Cuban capital, where fans come from all parts of the city to watch their team, the Industriales, play.
“We know what happened. Either the pork sandwiches or Tan Rico soda pop was contaminated at a game earlier this month,” the official said.
“Even some of the baseball players became sick,” she added.
Regional Coalition on Water and Sanitation for the Elimination of Cholera in the Island of Hispaniola
Zanzibar Shows Cholera Vaccine Can Protect Even The Unvaccinated
Cholera vaccine gives indirect protection to unvaccinated people in communities where a substantial fraction of the population gets the vaccine, a study in Africa shows.
The effect is called “herd immunity.” It works because there are fewer bacteria circulating in communities where vaccination levels are relatively high.
The result comes from Zanzibar, an island state of Tanzania, where half the people in six rural and urban areas received two doses of oral cholera vaccine. For those who got it, the vaccine was 79 percent protective against the disease. But their neighbors who didn’t get vaccinated had almost as much protection.
“This finding is good news for policymakers who have to deal with cholera in settings where…safe water supply and adequate sanitation cannot be established in a reasonable time frame,” the study authors write in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
They say that the direct and indirect effects of cholera vaccination could eventually eliminate the disease in communities with regular vaccination programs. This is in line with a 2007 prediction by statisticians, but it now has the authority of real-world results.
WATCH THIS: Baseball in the Time of Cholera
The message is simple: over 500,000 Haitians have been infected with Cholera and over 7,000 have died from the disease since October 2010. Yet, Haiti is still left without sufficient sanitation and water infrastructure or reparations for the more than half a million victims of the Cholera outbreak. Baseball in The Time of Cholera is a powerful insight into the tragedy and scandal of Haiti’s Cholera epidemic through the eyes of a young baseball player.
Haiti group demands UN pay for cholera outbreak
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A human rights group said Tuesday it has filed claims with the United Nations seeking damages on behalf of more than 5,000 Haitian cholera victims and their families.
The claims filed by the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti argue that the U.N. and its peacekeeping force are liable for hundreds of millions of dollars for failing to adequately screen peacekeeping soldiers.
They cite a range of studies that indicate the infected soldiers caused the outbreak when untreated waste from a U.N. base was dumped into a tributary of Haiti’s most important river.
“The sickness, death and ongoing harm from cholera suffered by Haiti’s citizens are a product of the U.N.’s multiple failures,” the complaint reads. “These failures constitute negligence, gross negligence, recklessness, and deliberate indifference for the lives of Haitians.”
Cholera has sickened nearly 500,000 people and killed more than 6,500 others since it surfaced in Haiti in October 2010, according to the Haitian Health Ministry. Evidence suggests that the disease was inadvertently brought to Haiti by a U.N. battalion from Nepal, where cholera is endemic. A local contractor failed to properly sanitize the waste of a U.N. base, and the bacteria leaked into a tributary of one of Haiti’s biggest rivers, according to a study by a U.N. appointed panel.
The disease spread throughout Haiti because of poor sanitation, and the country now has the highest cholera infection rate in the world.
International community fails in Haiti, again
…Under two big tents we see children in one, and adults in the other, hooked up to intravenous fluid that is rehydrating their bodies. Each bed has a 12-inch-diameter hole in the centre with a green plastic bucket underneath, for the diarrhoea that makes this disease become fatal if left untreated. A person can die within a few hours from the dehydration caused by diarrhoea and vomiting.
But if the patient is treated in time, it is easily cured. Cholera is also easily preventable; most of the world that could be susceptible to the disease is not because people have access to drinkable water, and access to sanitation.
Haiti did not have cholera either, for at least a century, until it was brought there by UN troops. Microbiological and genetic research has now confirmed that the Vibrio cholerae strain in Haiti is almost identical to the one in Nepal. It is virtually certain that the bacteria was introduced through human fecal material from the base of Nepalese UN troops, which made its way into the nearby Artibonite river.
This has infuriated many Haitians, not least because the troops that have been occupying the country since 2004 do not have any legitimate reason to be there. (Haiti has no civil conflict or other legal justification for this large-scale UN military presence). The saddest thing is that since it has reached a critical mass in Haiti, cholera has now become endemic to the country and will continue to kill Haitians for many years. It wasn’t intentional, but it was gross negligence on the part of the UN and they ought to be held responsible. For starters, the UN could take the $875m it is spending annually on this unwanted military occupation - nine times what it has raised for the cholera epidemic - and put it into treatment and prevention.
Prevention is ultimately the most effective way to reduce the toll of the disease and to eventually eliminate it, but for this Haiti needs water treatment facilities and delivery systems. These were urgent public health needs even before the cholera outbreak, to prevent other water-borne diseases. There were plans to build them in the mid-90s, with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans promised by multilateral lenders, but it never happened; then, international aid was cut off in a US-led effort from 2000-2004 to topple the elected government. The result contributed to the deaths we are seeing today. But even now that aid has been pledged and disbursed since the earthquake, we have not seen any water or sanitation infrastructure being built.
If you can, please donate to an organization that is involved in treating the cholera patients in Haiti, such as Partners in Health or Doctors Without Borders.
Study suggests UN force brought cholera to Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Evidence “strongly suggests” that a United Nations peacekeeping mission brought a cholera strain to Haiti that has killed thousands of people, a study by a team of epidemiologists and physicians says.
The study is the strongest argument yet that newly-arrived Nepalese peacekeepers at a base near the town of Mirebalais brought with them the cholera, which spread through the waterways of the Artibonite region and elsewhere in this impoverished Caribbean country.
The disease has killed more than 5,500 people and sickened more than 363,000 others since it was discovered in October, according to the Haitian government.
“Our findings strongly suggest that contamination of the Artibonite (river) and 1 of its tributaries downstream from a military camp triggered the epidemic,” said the report in the July issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Civil War That Killed Cholera
As troops loyal to West Pakistan fought Bengali paramilitaries and Indian troops over the course of 1971, 9 million refugees flooded across the border of what was then East Pakistan into India. At the time, Dr. Dilip Mahalanabis was working in a refugee camp in Bangaon, in India’s state of West Bengal, home to more than 350,000 refugees. He faced an epidemic of diarrheal disease spreading death throughout the camp, with mortality rates among infected patients running as high as 20 to 30 percent. At the time, intravenous salt solution was the standard response to diarrheal dehydration. But Mahalanabis had only two aides capable of administering intravenous drips, and supplies were running out. Overwhelmed, he turned to what hospital workers considered a decidedly inferior approach to tackling dehydration: giving people sugar-salt solution to swallow, or oral rehydration.
We usually rehydrate orally: it is called drinking. Unlike intravenous drips, downing a glass of solution doesn’t take skilled assistance — it also tastes great to people who are dehydrated (though less so to the rest of us — imagine drinking sweetened sea water). Mahalanabis just set up drums of the solution and told family members to keep on coming back with cups and bottles to fill until their relatives refused to drink more of the stuff. Rather than treating a few lucky victims who managed to make it to the clinic, the doctor was reaching people all across the camp. Death rates dropped from 20 to 30 percent to a stunning 3 percent.
Since 1971, and with the active support of the World Health Organization and donors, this type of oral rehydration has become a standard treatment for diarrheal disease. Sugar-salt packages mixed in the right proportions are now widely available for a few cents a dose, and even cheaper tools of prevention are available. There are bottles designed to use sunlight to disinfect water; programs encouraging people to add a small amount of bleach to drinking water have reduced diarrhea cases by between 50 and 80 percent.
Cholera outbreak feared in rural Haiti — 135 dead
ST. MARC, Haiti – At least 135 people have died in a suspected cholera outbreak, and aid groups are rushing in medicine and other supplies Friday to combat Haiti’s deadliest health problem since its devastating earthquake.
The outbreak in the rural Artibonite region, which hosts thousands of quake refugees, appeared to confirm relief groups’ fears about sanitation for homeless survivors living in tarp cities and other squalid settlements.
“We have been afraid of this since the earthquake,” said Robin Mahfood, president of Food for the Poor, which was preparing to fly in donations of antibiotics, dehydration salts and other supplies.
Many of the sick have converged on St. Nicholas hospital in the seaside city of St. Marc, where hundreds of dehydrated patients lay on blankets in a parking lot with IVs in their arms as they waited for treatment.
Catherine Huck, deputy country director for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the Caribbean nation’s health ministry had recorded 135 deaths and more than 1,000 infected people.
“What we know is that people have diarrhea, and they are vomiting, and (they) can go quickly if they are not seen in time,” Huck said. She said doctors were still awaiting lab results to pinpoint the disease.
The president of the Haitian Medical Association, Claude Surena, said the cause appeared to be cholera, but added that had not been confirmed by the government.
“The concern is that it could go from one place to another place, and it could affect more people or move from one region to another one,” he said.
Cholera is a waterborne bacterial infection spread through contaminated water. It causes severe diarrhea and vomiting that can lead to dehydration and death within hours. Treatment involves administering a salt and sugar-based rehydration serum.
Double Whammy: Malnutrition and Cholera Hit Refugee Camp in Kenya
From the International Rescue Committee, excerpt:
NAIROBI 16 Dec 2009 - Malnutrition rates are soaring and cholera is spreading at a camp in northwestern Kenya that has recently experienced significant influxes of refugees and steep funding cuts, says the aid group the International Rescue Committee.
An IRC survey conducted last month at Kakuma camp found that 17% of children under the age of five, or around 1,800 of 10,460 children, are malnourished. That’s a 6% jump from last year.
“Malnutrition among young children at Kakuma is now above the World Health Organization’s ‘critical’ threshold of 15% and newly arrived refugee children have been hit the hardest,” says Dr. Vincent Kahi, the IRC’s health coordinator in Kenya.
Newly-arrived refugees are the most vulnerable, as many are already in poor health and all rely 100% on aid agencies for food rations. Many families end up bartering some of their basic ration for other essentials – such as firewood – reducing the amount of food that they ultimately provide to their young children.
Dr. Kahi says the shortage of nutritious food has also led to unacceptably high levels of anemia in young children.
“The IRC was alarmed to find that more than 70% of children surveyed are anemic, which can cause general weakness, shortness of breath and in severe cases, cardiac problems,” says Dr. Kahi. “It’s urgent that health care providers in the camp strengthen specific interventions, such as increasing the use of micronutrient powder.”
Fluctuations in population size and funding at Kakuma are compounding health problems. Thousands of former predominantly Sudanese inhabitants returned home following Sudan’s peace accord of 2005 and resources were reduced as a result. However, a recent influx of refugees from war-torn Somali has boosted the camp’s residents to more than 60,000, creating an urgent need for more funding and assistance.
Please consider making a donation or buying a gift from the IRC to help those most vulnerable this holiday season.
Those fleeing the fighting end up in camps that are already home to tens of thousands of people displaced by previous rounds of fighting between the army and rebel groups. The camps are crowded, food is scarce and disease common.
