Death Rate Slows After Cholera Kills 253 in Haiti

(Oct. 25) -- A swift international medical response has helped to slow the number of Haitians dying in a cholera outbreak that's claimed more than 250 lives, but another 3,100 people are infected, and experts warn the disease could still spread.

The outbreak began in central rural regions of Haiti, and the fear is that it could quickly sweep south through the capital of Port-au-Prince, where 1.3 million survivors of last January's earthquake live in tented camps without adequate access to clean water and medicine.

Cholera strikes victims so quickly that they can die of severe dehydration from diarrhea before doctors are able to treat them. That's been the case over the past week in Haiti, where poverty and poor hygiene are rampant, and it was made worse by January's quake. The disease is spread through dirty water and food.

"It travels with the speed of lightning, I've heard, and it can kill a person in four hours," Jean Michel Maximilien, a local leader at a camp of quake refugees in Port-au-Prince, told The New York Times. "So of course we are all on edge."

Haiti's health ministry confirmed Sunday that 253 people have died and more than 3,100 others are suffering from the disease. But officials said quick international aid has helped them slow the death rate, from 10.6 percent of known cases three days earlier to 8.2 percent now, the Times reported.

"We have registered a diminishing in numbers of deaths and of hospitalized people in the most critical areas. ... The tendency is that it is stabilizing, without being able to say that we have reached a peak," Gabriel Thimote, director-general of Haiti's Health Department, told a news conference, according to Reuters. Only 33 people have died in the past 24 hours, he said.

Haiti's health minister, Dr. Alex Larsen, told CNN he believes the cholera outbreak is stabilizing. But a senior U.N. official there cautioned that the outbreak could still widen.

"We must gear up for a serious epidemic, even though we hope it won't happen," Nigel Fisher, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, told Reuters.

Five cholera cases were reported in Port-au-Prince over the weekend, but they were all people who'd traveled to the capital from the hard-hit Artibonite region and thus don't represent a new infection area, the BBC reported.

"It's not difficult to prevent the spread to Port-au-Prince," Thimote told the BBC.

But heath workers caution that the situation is still volatile and dangerous. They're distributing oral re-hydration tablets, water purification equipment and bars of soap in tented camps in the capital.

"There are still hundreds of thousands of people living in extremely bad conditions in the capital, and the key thing now is to prevent this disease from spreading," Sarah Jacobs, who is with the charity Save the Children, told the BBC.

While at least 1.3 million earthquake survivors still live in crowded, makeshift tent cities on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, word came Sunday that January's quake may have been caused by a previously undetected fault that could erupt again. Scientific papers published in the journal Nature Geoscience cite a "blind fault" under which pressure is steadily building.

"It's locked and loaded. My concern is that we are in the beginning of new cycles of earthquakes," one of the papers' authors, Purdue University geophysicist Andrew Freed, told The Miami Herald.

The research suggests another earthquake could be coming in Haiti.

"There is another shoe waiting to drop at one or both ends of the rupture zone,'' University of Miami earthquake expert Timothy Dixon, who co-authored another of the studies, told the same paper. "We can't say very much about when that other shoe will drop. It could be 100 years from now or it could be next month.''