When Hurricane Matthew swept through the Caribbean and up the U.S. East Coast from Florida to North Carolina it caused 15 billion dollars worth of damage. In Haiti, which Matthew hit first, the hurricane not only swept away structures and stripped forests, but also due to extensive flooding caused the resurgence of cholera.
What is cholera?
Cholera is an intestinal infection caused by the bacterium Vibrio Cholerae. It spreads through the fecal-oral route; people are infected when feces containing the bacterium contaminate water and then are ingested. Transmission of the disease can also be through food that has been cooked with contaminated water or irrigated and washed with water containing the bacterium.
The first symptoms of cholera are; diarrhea, fatigue and some vomiting. The vomiting and diarrhea cause severe dehydration and if not treated, the symptoms escalate and can be fatal. Small children have gotten seizures and people report delusions because they haven’t received treatment. Unfortunately, many infected people don’t go to clinics because the disease’s symptoms are so unpleasant for caretakers that it causes self-shame among patients. Treating cholera can be a simple matter of rehydration, yet people ignore the first signs of the disease and then face severe consequences.
In Haiti, about 10,000 people have died since 2010 due to cholera and hundreds of thousands have fallen ill. A small clinic in Rendel, Haiti, is comprised of a tiny concrete room, where a few nurses struggle to care for the overwhelming numbers of patients that arrive every hour. Rendel’s first cholera care center had been destroyed in the hurricane, a week after it was constructed. “Ninety percent of our village is gone,” said Eric Valcourt, a priest in the Roman Catholic Parish. In the makeshift clinic families risk their safety to nurse their family members back to health, especially since the patients in the clinic are kept in compact spaces.
In the areas infected by cholera, residents are challenged by the lack of clean water. In Rendel, the only source of water is a cholera infected river, yet filtration and disinfection is an unattainable luxury. Most of Haiti lacks adequate sanitation and water purification systems. There is no natural supply of clean drinking water.
How did cholera become endemic to Haiti?
Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary General of the U.N., admitted that the cholera epidemic in Haiti was fueled when the U.N agency Peacekeep accidentally dumped sewage into a river. A United Nations-commissioned contractor emptied the camp’s septic tanks into a tributary of the Artibonite River in 2010. Ban Ki-Moon’s administration is scrambling to compensate for the tragedy they’ve inflicted with a plan to give affected communities cash payments through a $400 million cholera response package. He also wants to make good on an unfulfilled promise to eradicate cholera from Haiti as the disease continues to claim lives. Even though the U.N. has not legally accepted these responsibilities, they claim to assist and aid those in Haiti.
While the U.N. attempts to make amends, Haiti Red Cross volunteers are working hard to staunch the epidemic. Red Cross teams will bring vaccines to sixteen different communities in Grande-Anse and the South of Haiti. The volunteers will also conduct a door-to-door outreach program as a way to promote a campaign that vaccinates over 820,000 people. “The vaccination campaign, as well as improving water quality, sanitation and hygiene, should increase our effectiveness in cholera prevention across areas hit by Hurricane Matthew,” said Dr. Colette Guiteau. “The ability of Red Cross volunteers to access remote and vulnerable communities will be critical to that effort.” A single dose of the vaccine is estimated to prevent 60% to 70% of cholera cases. Additionally, the Red Cross distributed 4,500 relief kits in recent weeks.
