Red Cross Blogs

Haiti: fighting cholera in the capital

By Sarah Oughton
November 10, 2010 at 10:11 am

Mandy George, our communications delegate in Haiti, reports back on the developing cholera situation in the aftermath of Hurricane Tomas:

Tomas was kind to us. The potentially crippling hurricane passed us by without unleashing its full fury on this already devastated nation. The mood that followed was a relieved anti-climax of the finest variety. The streets were deserted, an eerie calm prevailed over the city. There was some damage, and a handful of people lost their lives, proof of the vulnerability of so many to a tropical storm. Many of the camps in Port-au-Prince spent a couple of days very muddy, and minor repairs were needed to some shelters. The disaster preparedness measures that the British Red Cross had put in place seem to have been very effective – canals drained excess water away, sandbags prevented them from flooding, people were able to protect their most valuable documents from the water. So lucky. “God decided to be kind to us,” one lady told me.

And so yesterday, my heart was heavy, a great sadness descended on me, to find out that we are facing an extremely serious situation that we were desperately hoping to avoid, though realistically it was unlikely. Cholera has come to La Piste camp, home to at least 50,000, where the British Red Cross has been working since the earthquake. Yesterday alone, we saw 20 cases of people showing cholera-like symptoms, although results from the laboratory will take some time to come back. But we all know what it is. Fortunately, we have been expecting the worst, while hoping for the best, so we were, and are prepared to deal with this.

The British Red Cross cholera observation centre kicked into action, referring the most serious cases to a cholera treatment centre, and treating less severe patients with IV drips and oral rehydration treatment. All ten beds quickly filled up, and today we have seen another 15 cases. Not all come from the camp: the word has travelled and we have seen people from outside coming to the centre to seek assistance. It is going to be a busy time. So far things have been running smoothly and are under control, but this is obviously a very worrying series of events. And so, we have plans to step up our activities in the camp as much as possible, continuing with the critical job of spreading hygiene messages to keep people safe, setting up chlorination points where people can sterilise their buckets to collect treated water in safe containers, and reinforcing our latrine cleaning teams to make sure that we have dedicated people from the community on duty all day long. The cleaner the camp, the safer the camp.

As the children play around La Piste, singing their little songs about hand washing, I feel a sense of relief that at least they have some support here, at least we can do something. Seriously concerning, are those parts of Port-au-Prince where there is no sanitation at all. I recently visited an area with no toilets, just the canal. “Well, we used to have toilets, but they were just a hole over the canal,” one resident told me. Cholera in that area could spread like wild fire.

And so it is one disaster after another, but that is why we are here, so we are all trying to muster up as much strength as we can to keep fighting to keep this new threat at bay, and deeply hoping that many more do not lose their lives in the face of this most recent crisis.

Find out more about our work in Haiti

Photo 1 credit: Severine Vanel/IFRC

Photo 2 credit: Talia Frenkel/American Red Cross

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Tags: cholera, disaster, earthquake, Haiti, hurricane

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 10th, 2010 at 10:11 am and is filed under Emergencies, Health and social care, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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