Near­ly 15 years af­ter Haiti ex­pe­ri­enced a cholera out­break that in­fect­ed over 820,000 peo­ple, killing 10,000 oth­ers, the French-speak­ing Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (CARI­COM) coun­try is re­port­ing new cholera cas­es.

The Of­fice for the Co­or­di­na­tion of Hu­man­i­tar­i­an Af­fairs (OC­CA) says it is con­cerned about cholera, with new sus­pect­ed cas­es be­ing re­port­ed dai­ly.

Since the be­gin­ning of the year, more than 900 sus­pect­ed cas­es and four con­firmed cas­es have been record­ed na­tion­wide, said Farhan Haq, the Deputy Spokesman for the UN Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al, An­to­nio Guter­res.

He said in Cité Soleil, more than 100 sus­pect­ed cas­es have been re­port­ed in the past three weeks and that the de­te­ri­o­rat­ing se­cu­ri­ty sit­u­a­tion hin­ders ac­cess for sur­veil­lance teams and re­sponse ef­forts, rais­ing con­cerns about un­de­tect­ed com­mu­ni­ty trans­mis­sion.

Haq said the gov­ern­ment in Haiti and the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) are joint­ly re­spond­ing to the out­break by pro­vid­ing med­i­cine and med­ical sup­plies and set­ting up re­hy­dra­tion and chlo­ri­na­tion points.

“OCHA al­so warns that years of un­der­fund­ing for the hu­man­i­tar­i­an re­sponse means that mil­lions of Haitians are miss­ing out on the es­sen­tial sup­port they need,” he said, not­ing that fund­ing for wa­ter, san­i­ta­tion and hy­giene ser­vices is par­tic­u­lar­ly low, with on­ly US$3.6 mil­lion out of the re­quired US$87 mil­lion re­ceived.

“Ad­di­tion­al­ly, just less than 30 per cent of health fa­cil­i­ties with beds across the coun­try – and just over 40 per cent in the Port-au-Prince met­ro­pol­i­tan area – are ful­ly op­er­a­tional,”  he added.

The new cholera out­break was ini­tial­ly re­port­ed in Oc­to­ber 2022 af­ter more than three years with­out re­port­ed cas­es, but two con­firmed cas­es of Vib­rio choler­ae O1 were re­port­ed in the greater Port-au-Prince area on Oc­to­ber 2, 2022.

Cholera out­break re­spons­es re­quire a mul­ti­pronged, mul­ti­sec­toral ap­proach in­clud­ing sur­veil­lance, case man­age­ment, ac­cess to safe wa­ter, san­i­ta­tion, and hy­giene (WASH) ser­vices, tar­get­ed oral cholera vac­cine (OCV) cam­paigns, risk com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and com­mu­ni­ty en­gage­ment.

The cholera out­break in 2010 was de­scribed as the worst in re­cent his­to­ry.

UNIT­ED NA­TIONS, Mar 21, CMC –

CMC/ag/ir/2025