via cnn.com
The confirmation of five cholera cases in Haiti’s capital is a “very worrying development,” a U.N. spokeswoman told CNN.
Public health officials are working to keep the country’s cholera outbreak from spreading in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where tens of thousands of people are still living in sprawling tent cities after January’s devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake.
The fast-moving outbreak has claimed at least 208 lives in other parts of the country, said Imogen Wall, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti. And the country’s health ministry is reporting an additional 2,679 cases.
Port-au-Prince could still be safe. Wall said the five patients were infected north of the capital, and those confirmed cases do not mean cholera has spread to Port-au-Prince.
“Our response system worked, but obviously this is a very worrying development,” Wall told CNN.
The five patients in Port-au-Prince were infected in Artibonite, north of the capital, Wall said. They traveled to the nation’s main city, where health officials discovered them to be infected within the incubation period, she said.
The five have been isolated and are receiving treatment, she said.
But meanwhile, officials are stepping up sanitation efforts and setting up quarantine areas in Port-au-Prince. And authorities are bracing themselves for a possible larger outbreak nationwide.
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