Haiti: Spike in cholera deaths in Haiti seen as hurricane season begins

Via Google News, a typical "Oh dear, poor Haiti" report from The Canadian Press: Doctor: Spike in cholera deaths in Haiti seen as hurricane season begins. Excerpt:

A Haitian doctor says he is seeing more cholera deaths as the rainy season shifts into the hurricane season. 

Dr. Gabriel Thimothee is the executive director of Haiti's health ministry. He said 10 people have died of cholera since May 26. They all died in Carrefour, a seaside city just outside Port-au-Prince. 

It had been two weeks since somebody died of the diarrheal disease. 

Rain has soaked the Haitian capital almost every night in recent weeks. Thimothee said Tuesday that rain water contaminated with the cholera bacteria may be infecting people.

This report arrived just as I was about to post on a remarkable change in the cholera reports of the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP in French). If you click through, you'll see two links on "Rapport par commune sur le cholera" for the 19th and 20th epidemiological weeks, which I presume mean May 8-14 and May 15-21.

The Canadian Press report says no one had died of cholera in the two weeks before May 26. But for week 20, the new reports break down cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by community—far more precise than the reports we've getting since last October.

And in week 20, the report lists 19 cholera deaths, whether in the community or in hospitals. It doesn't provide totals (I had to count them one by one), and the tally includes huge gaps. Most of the communities in Sud department, for example, are blank. The incidence map at the top of the PDF shows blanks all over the country.

The report also shows 359 cholera cases in Port-au-Prince in that week, 148 of them serious enough to warrant hospitalization. If 10 people have died of cholera in Carrefour since May 26, none died in week 20. But 416 people in Carrefour had cholera in week 20, and 136 went into hospital with it.

So what is going on here? I don't have the time or the expertise to draw meaningful conclusions from these new data. You might almost call it "infogmation"--information that only conceals the reality in the treatment centres and hospitals.

I would really like to see Dr. Timothee hold a press conference with a PowerPoint slide show, explaining the current state of cholera in Haiti as of June 1, in detail. 

It would be nice if the minister of MSPP, Dr. Alex Larsen, would show up at the conference also. The only thing on the MSPP website with his name on it is an article posted on April 7, 2010, about the earthquake. Since then, he has been an invisible and inaudible man.