Haiti faces cholera outbreak

For the first time in 100 years, cholera is raging in Haiti. The Haitian minister of health reported on Oct. 24 that 250 people have died from it, mainly in and around Saint-Marc, a small city about 50 miles northwest of Port-au-Prince.

Saint-Nicolas, the hospital serving Saint-Marc and the surrounding areas, is overflowing with patients. The French television network TV5 showed every bed filled, every possible floor space also filled, and patients lying on mats in the courtyard; patients who didn’t have cholera were being rejected.

While Saint-Marc has a hospital and doctors, how and if cholera has spread in the small communities around it is not known. Most of the areas of confirmed cholera death are centered around Saint-Marc, stretching up to Gonaïves and Cap-Haïtien, two of the largest cities in Haiti.

According to the Havana Times (Oct. 24), hundreds of Cuban doctors were in Haiti long before, during and after the January 2010 earthquake that caused so much devastation. Haiti is located across the Windward Passage from Cuba. This cholera outbreak, which has so quickly killed more than 250 people, will put local and foreign medical workers to the test.

The cholera raging in Haiti is virulent — 50 percent of people untreated will die in less than a day after they start showing signs of the disease. It is generally spread in water contaminated with feces or food prepared with such water. Washing hands and drinking clean water are two ways of avoiding it.

Following these “simple” rules will save lives, but they are not so simple for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians made homeless by the Jan. 12 earthquake. Various estimates of the number of homeless people range from 850,000 to 2 million.

Cholera spreading to the capital is the greatest fear of public health officials in Haiti.

If a homeless person or family has a tent, they are lucky — the United Nations emergency program just calls for a tarp and two sticks. Almost none of the more than 1,000 homeless camps have running water. Some get water every other day, others once a week. In others the individual families have to get their own. Even washing hands is not simple for a family that has to choose between soap and food.

Many of the camps are filled with standing water and mud after rains. Some camps have latrines; others don’t. For some of the camps with latrines, they are emptied regularly; some camps don’t get this service.

Why are conditions so bad?

After the earthquake, billions of dollars were raised by aid organizations like Oxfam, UNESCO and the Red Cross to help Haiti. Most of this money is still sitting dormant in bank accounts; what has been spent is the interest. Most of what foreign governments have pledged hasn’t been disbursed.

Only about 2 percent of the rubble in Port-au-Prince has been removed, according to U.N. estimates. But clearing a significant amount of the rubble is what must be done before rebuilding can take place.

The United States still hasn’t turned over any of the funds it pledged back in January — unless one counts the cost of the 22,000 troops it sent to occupy Haiti for the fifth time. Former President Bill Clinton is co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, along with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

How the IHRC operates can be seen in how it “allocated” $94 million in August to get schools ready to open. Just $26 million was funded. No wonder fewer kids are in school than ever before and Haiti’s Ministry of Education says it has not seen any of the money. (Haïti-Liberté, Oct. 13-16)

Living conditions in Port-au-Prince are horrible. Despite this, the protests that have occurred have been generally small, probably due in great measure to the daily struggle for sustenance and survival. A few hundred protesters shadowed Clinton when he was in Port-au-Prince for an IHRC meeting.

When about 100 protesters gathered in front of the U.N. base at the airport on Oct. 15 to protest against granting an extension to the U.N. occupation force MINUSTAH, the occupying troops fired in the air to break up the crowd.

When some students and professors held a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Education on Oct. 7 to demand back pay and the provision of other facilities for the homeless now sheltered in schools, cops used tear gas to break up the crowd and then fired live ammunition, killing math teacher Jean Philibert Louis.