Haiti cholera death toll stands at 442

Port-au-Prince, Agency
The death toll from the cholera outbreak in Haiti rose to 442, while the disease has now been detected in five of the country's 10 provinces, officials said Wednesday.

The number of fatalities has risen by 105 since last Saturday, while the number of people hospitalized to date stands at 6,742, the director of the Family Health department within the Public Health Ministry, Jocelyne Pierre-Louis, reported.

In addition, the disease, which initially was only found in the provinces of Artibonite and Plateau Central, now has been detected in three others: namely Ouest, Nord-Ouest and Nord.

Authorities are worried the outbreak may spread to the capital, where masses of people remain in refugee camps set up after the Jan. 12 earthquake that left some 250,000 dead and more than 1 million Haitians homeless.

Pierre-Louis said that teams of epidemiologists have been dispatched to several regions of the country to speed up the testing being done to verify the presence of the disease.

Despite the fact that they have been entered in the tally as cholera, an unspecified number of cases have not been definitively confirmed by the necessary testing, and so the teams are supervising the largest number of tests that they can.

She refused to discuss the investigation into the origin of the epidemic and restricted herself to saying that her department is not involved in that activity.

The U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or Minustah, on Wednesday emphasized "the difficulty, even the impossibility" of knowing how the disease arrived in the country, despite the fact that it has been proven that the cholera bacteria currently being found in Haiti are identical to the strain found in South Asia.

At the beginning of the disease's spread, health authorities said that it was an "imported" epidemic and that the Artibonite River, which runs through the affected zones, was "contaminated."

Later, a unit of Nepalese soldiers attached to Minustah and based near the river, was suspected of contaminating the watercourse with fecal matter, but the U.N. mission denies those accusations and claims that all the tests performed on samples collected at the base in question and in the surrounding area have come back negative.