Aid Groups Race to Stop Cholera Outbreak in Haiti

(Oct. 22) -- Health officials in Haiti and the United States have confirmed that an outbreak of cholera has killed more than 100 people and sent hundreds more to the hospital in a rural area of the earthquake-battered country.

Even before test results were confirmed today, aid groups were rushing medical supplies to the hard-hit Artibonite region, racing to stop the outbreak from reaching the densely populated camps around the capital, Port-au-Prince.

"We're distinctly alarmed," Andrew Marx, spokesman for Partners in Health, one of the largest aid organizations in Haiti, told AOL News today. "It's an all-hands-on-deck effort. We can't get out ahead of it at this point, but we need to get out there and really mount the kind of response in terms of education, the distribution of clean water and getting resources to hospitals so we're able to treat and save people.

"We need to try to stop this where it is now so it doesn't reach Port-au-Prince."

Artibonite wasn't hit by the January earthquake, but the region has received thousands of refugees from Port-au-Prince in the past year, making the area ripe for a health crisis of this kind.

Experts have braced for other health crises in the country since the devastating earthquake. However, they say cholera, a water-borne, diarrheal disease that thrives in areas with poor sanitation, hasn't been seen in Haiti in more than 50 years, making the response all the more difficult.

Cholera, they say, can kill a healthy person within hours after it strikes. The disease causes severe dehydration, vomiting and diarrhea, and is passed along in fecal matter through dirty water.

"People are alive and well in the morning and then dead by the afternoon," said Dr. David Sack, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University.

The potential for a cholera epidemic is especially acute in Haiti because of the country's notoriously poor sanitation infrastructure, which was inadequate even before the earthquake struck. Which is why Sack, who has helped develop vaccines for cholera, said that aid groups and government officials probably should have thought about vaccinating people for cholera in the 10 months since the earthquake.

"Just because Haiti didn't have cholera before is no reason not to put a system of vaccination in place," he said. "We just don't have good ways of predicting where it's going to pop up."

At least 138 people have been killed by cholera in Haiti so far, and thousands more have been sickened, Imogen Wall, the U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman in Haiti, told CNN.

If it's treated early on, the disease is survivable, but experts say health workers have to move quickly.

"There's no reason for people to die of cholera," Sack said. "It wouldn't take a lot to put in the treatment facilities that would prevent 100 percent of the deaths, but it takes a massive effort to bring the resources there."