Wed Nov 10, 2010 11:53pm GMT

By Joseph Guyler-Delva

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – A three-week-old cholera epidemic that has killed more than 640 people in Haiti is spreading quickly in the northwest coastal city of Gonaives, authorities said on Wednesday.

Pierrelus Saint-Justin, the mayor of Gonaives, said he personally buried 31 people on Tuesday and had another 15 bodies in a truck waiting for burial.

“Others should be dying as we speak,” Saint-Justin told Reuters in a telephone interview. “Since November 5 until today, we have buried at least 70 people and that is only in the downtown area of Gonaives. There are more people who died in rural areas surrounding Gonaives.”

The city is no stranger to tragedy, since much of it was encased in mud by hurricanes and tropical storms that killed several thousand people in 2004 and 2008.

But Saint-Justin said the situation was once again “getting catastrophic” in Gonaives, possibly worsened by flooding from Hurricane Tomas earlier this month.

“We are calling on all those who can come to help,” he said. “The hospitals are full. We are overwhelmed.”

It was not clear how many of the Gonaives deaths were included in the most recent figures issued by Haiti’s health ministry, which said cholera had killed 648 people in the Caribbean country and sickened 9,971 up to November 8.

Radio reports from across the poorest nation in the Americas indicate the death toll could easily exceed 700 people when updated figures are released on Friday.

Cholera, a diarrheal disease transmitted by contaminated water, has mostly hit Haiti’s rural central regions so far. But authorities say it has now gained a foothold in Port-au-Prince and is menacing crowded slum areas of the capital.

Among the most vulnerable areas are tent and tarpaulin camps in Port-au-Prince still housing more than 1.3 million survivors of Haiti’s devastating January 12 earthquake.

(Editing by Tom Brown and John O’Callaghan)