Haiti cholera toll tops 250

A multinational medical response has slowed deaths in a Haitian cholera epidemic that has killed more than 250 people so far, but the outbreak is likely to widen, a senior U.N. official said on Sunday.

"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.

More than 3,000 cholera cases have been reported so far in the poor, earthquake-hit Caribbean nation, which is experiencing its second humanitarian crisis since a catastrophic earthquake on January 12.

The U.N., Haiti's government and aid partners have launched a major effort to try to contain the epidemic.

This involved setting up cholera treatment centers to isolate patients in the two worst affected central provinces, Artibonite and Center, and in the capital Port-au-Prince. The main outbreak areas straddle the Artibonite River watershed, suspected of being the main propagator of the deadly disease.

"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.

With a number of confirmed cases in Port-au-Prince and suspected cases reported in the town of L'Arcahaie and in the country's northern second city of Cap-Haitien, Fisher said the expectation was that the outbreak would spread geographically.

Accumulated deaths since the cholera outbreak began around a week ago stood at 253, while cases totaled 3,015, mostly in the Artibonite region, Haitian health authorities said.

President Rene Preval on Sunday visited Saint-Marc, the coastal town at the center of the Artibonite outbreak zone whose hospital had been overwhelmed with patients suffering the acute diarrheal disease that can kill in hours through dehydration. It is transmitted by contaminated water and food.

Health workers were distributing kits of soap bars, water purification tablets and oral rehydration sachets to people on the Artibonite River watershed and also in Port-au-Prince.

SCIENTISTS SEE NEW QUAKE RISK

The detection of five "imported" cholera cases in Port-au-Prince, involving patients who had traveled south to the city from the central outbreak zone, has raised fears of the virulent diarrheal disease spreading in the capital.

Experts see as vulnerable to infection the inhabitants of Port-au-Prince's sprawling, squalid slums and around 1.3 million quake survivors left homeless by the earthquake who live precariously in tent and tarpaulin camps across the city.

Scientific papers published by seismology experts in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday said the January earthquake may have been caused by an unseen fault and pressure could be building for another quake.