"Haiti is not beyond hope"

This is “not your grandmother’s cholera,” writes Paul Farmer and Zanmi Lasante’s codirector of women’s health, Jean-Renold Rejouit, in “How We Can Stop Cholera,” an essay appearing in the December 13 issue of Newsweek.

Many epidemiologists and other experts have observed that the strain that has surfaced throughout Haiti (“an El Tor biotype of Vibrio cholerae serogroup 01”) seems especially virulent and hard to slow down.

Meanwhile, since late October, more than two thousand people have died from cholera, and more than 36,000 have been hospitalized with the disease. “This makes it all the more urgent for the world to renew its relief efforts in Haiti,” writes Farmer and Dr. Rejouit, “and to resist the temptation to write off the country’s 10 million people as beyond hope.”

Farmer and Rejouit advocate delivering quality care to the sick, including two measures that have been deemed too costly by others in global health – aggressive use of antibiotics, and a massive oral cholera vaccination campaign.

More importantly, they emphasize the need to strengthen Haiti’s almost nonexistent water supply and sanitation infrastructure – this too, is an element of “fully integrated prevention and care.”

Read the full Newsweek article.