Haiti, three treatment centers for cholera opened in Port-au Prince: a cyclical and frequent epidemic

ROME – The Medical-Humanitarian Organization and Nobel Peace Prize, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), in collaboration with local health authorities, intervenes in the response to the cholera emergency in Haiti with the opening of three treatment centers in the capital, Port-au-Prince. The first, in the Brooklyn neighborhood, has 10 beds, the second was set up in the MSF emergency center in Turgau and can admit up to 20 patients. The last center, with 50 beds, is in the MSF hospital in Cité Soleil.

The increase in hospitalizations. On 3 October, the MSF teams admitted 68 patients to the three centers, only the one in Cité Soleil still has some vacancies, while the other facilities are already full. A 3-year-old child died. In recent days, several potentially infected people with symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea have arrived in the center in Turgeau and in the hospital in Cité Soleil. A sample from a Turgeau patient tested positive for cholera.

The difficult access to treatment for widespread and continuous violence. Cholera has returned at a time when access to treatment for the people of Haiti is very difficult. Insecurity, violence, as well as the shortage of fuel and drinking water, have forced many health facilities to reduce their activities or in other cases to stop them. In addition, public transport is reduced due to a lack of fuel and it is very difficult to move around the country to access treatment.

That constant commendation to the Eternal Father. The disaster of the Haitian people unable to find a credible ruling class has always been felt by reading the writings on the walls and even in taxis, where they shout invocations such as “Dieu ne nous abandonne pas, and other desperate invocations and appeals “. We wrote it in February 2018 on these pages in a reportage from the Haitian capital:” Brief pleas from a people to whom it seems that there is nothing left but to recommend itself to the Eternal Father. Those cars, those creaking vans, on the verge of definitive failure, overflowing with people and as colorful as the cars of the rides, reveal a fact: that of a vulnerable country, proud and dignified, but unable to give a credible face to a its ruling class “.

That devastating outbreak of 2010. Cholera is a very frequent epidemic in the very unfortunate Caribbean island, divided in half between a French-speaking population (Haiti, in fact) and a Spanish-speaking population, the Dominican Republic, with Santo Domingo as its capital, which instead seems to be almost always immune from epochal disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, epidemics. Cholera in Haiti – after about a century – began to spread very seriously in 2010, the day after that Tuesday, January 12, when the earth shook for long seconds, causing about 260,000 deaths. There was talk of the spread of cholera at the end of October of that year in the Saint-Marc region, about 100 km north of Port-au-Prince. There were at least 150,000 infected people and about 3,500 dead. The disease then spread to affect over 800,000 people, killing at least 10,000. A massacre, in short.

Infected rivers and the Nepalese UN base. The numerous (perhaps too many) humanitarian organizations that flocked after the 2010 earthquake quickly realized that the cholera had to do with the fact that people had been drinking water from the Artibonite River. In this way, doctors, medicines, drinking water and other aids were sent to the site precisely to stem and stop the spread. The suspicion also arose that the island’s complex river system, consisting of at least a dozen streams, had been infected by a Nepalese base of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). The outbreak was confirmed in 10 departments, including Arcahaie, Limbé, Mirebalais and the capital Port-au-Prince. It also spread to the infamous, very violent neighborhood of Citè Soleil, whose population rebelled, asking the Nepalese of the UN to leave the country