A cholera outbreak that has sickened more than 91,000 people and killed more than 2,000 has spread to all of the island nation and into the neighboring Dominican Republic, the CDC says.
A cholera outbreak in Haiti that has sickened more than 91,000 people and killed more than 2,000 has spread to all of the Caribbean nation and into the neighboring Dominican Republic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. Nearly half of the ill were hospitalized.
In some cases, the deaths are occurring as rapidly as two hours after people fall ill, according to a CDC report published Wednesday in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Patients can lose as much as one liter of fluid an hour, said Dr. Jordan W. Tappero, director of the Health Systems Reconstruction Office at the CDC’s Center for Global Health.
“It’s in all 10 [regions] of the country,” Tappero told reporters. “It’s everywhere.”Fatality rates are highest in the most recent areas of the country to see the disease, Tappero said.
Tappero said Haiti’s neighbor to the east, the Dominican Republic, is now reporting cases of cholera in its two largest cities. He said the Dominican Republic was likely to fare better because unlike Haiti the country has better access to sanitary water.
Haiti has not seen cholera in at least a century, leaving the population without immunity to the disease, a situation made worse because the strain is a virulent hybrid, according to CDC Director Thomas Frieden.
“You have a perfect storm for cholera,” Frieden said.
The CDC’s announcement came a day after the Associated Press reported that a contingent of United Nations peacekeepers was the likely source of the cholera outbreak, citing a report written by a scientist who was sent by the French government to assist Haitian health officials. According to the news agency, soldiers who arrived at a base in Haiti soon before the cholera outbreak came from Nepal. CDC officials are not investigating the source of the Haitian outbreak but did analyze the cholera strain and found it to be one that is circulating in South Asia.
“This was not a new strain that developed in Haiti,” Tappero said.
Two people in Florida who had visited Haiti have developed cholera, Tappero said, but the disease is not like to spread widely in the U.S. because of access to sanitation and clean water.