Haiti could be facing nearly twice as many cases of cholera this year than what the United Nations has predicted, say researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Francisco.

A new study warns that nearly 780,000 cholera cases could develop in 2011, with the disease killing about 11,000. The UN had estimated 400,000 cases of the diarrheal disease for Haiti.

So far, 231,070 cholera cases and 4,549 deaths have been reported by the Haitian government. Prior to the earthquake last year that destroyed much of the island’s infrastructure and produced unsanitary conditions, Haiti had not experienced a single cholera case in more than 100 years.

UCSF medical resident Sanjay Basu, MD, has warned that the “epidemic is not likely to be short-term.”

“It is going to be larger than predicted in terms of sheer numbers and will last far longer than the initial projections,” Basu added.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

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COMMENT: HAITIAN-TRUTH.ORG

Why should we believe Haitian government estimates?

Rene Preval does not care and the Minister of Health is usually drunk, a nice guy but drunk.

And, why should we believe that the Ministry of Health has any interest in helping the nation’s people when his representative in the North West took all of the re-hydration supplies from the ONGs working there to sell on his own account. The ONGs simply quit working in the NW and more people dies.

Some of the ministry officials should face a firing squad or – more economically – be infected with cholera and left to fend for themselves in some small country home.