Nearly four months after the reappearance of cholera in Haiti, the death toll in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member state has risen to 496.
In a statement on Saturday, the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) said the country has already registered 25,182 suspected cases and 21,407 hospitalized, 73 new, while 312 of the 496 deaths occurred in health institutions and 184 in communities.
In a bulletin, the health authorities stated that the average age of those infected is 19 years, and the positivity rate is 37.25 percent, of the suspected cases – 56.60 percent are men, and the remaining are women.
The most affected age group is 1 to 4 years old, with 374 confirmed cases of more than 3,000 suspected cases.
The most affected department is the west, where Port-au-Prince is located and where more than one-third of the population lives, with 1,155 confirmed cases for 16,408 suspected cases.
Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the world is suffering unprecedented cholera outbreaks in countries affected by climate disasters and other crises.
Cholera is an acute enteric infection caused by ingesting the bacteria Vibrio cholerae present in contaminated water or food. It is mainly linked to inadequate sanitation and insufficient access to safe drinking water
As a result, vaccines to prevent this disease have become “extremely scarce.”
Cholera was first reported in Haiti in October 2010. Nationally, a total of 820 000 cases of cholera including 9792 deaths were reported between October 2010 and February 2019. The last confirmed case in this outbreak was reported in January 2019 in I’Estère in the Artibonite department of Haiti. The country did not report a single case of cholera in the three years from January 2019 to January 2022. The current outbreak is also occurring in the context of a complex humanitarian crisis that is exacerbating the burden of disease and hindering response measures.
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