Less than a year after the Haitian government declared that the disease had been eradicated in the country, it is still happening.
The country has reported 13,668 cases and 283 deaths since October.
The last outbreak of the disease in Haiti happened in 2010. According to a correspondence from the New England Journal of Medicine, experts say that the 2010 strain is related to the current outbreak in Haiti.
According to the WHO, the current outbreak was first reported on October 2. Between October 2010 and February 2019, the country reported 820,000 cases of the disease.
The Haitian government declared that there had been an end to the disease.
When a person ingests water or food that is contaminated with a bacterium called vibrio cholerae, they are at risk of contracting the disease. Dehydration and watery diarrhea are the most common symptoms.
Less than 1% of people who become sick die if proper treatments are available, according to the World Health Organization. The disease can kill people very quickly if not treated.
Rehydrating patients with a solution is one of the treatments. There are three vaccines the WHO uses that can prevent the spread of the disease.
A shipment of one million doses of a vaccine called Euvichol was sent to Haiti by the World Health Organization. There are expected to be more vaccines arriving in Haiti.
An earthquake in January of 2010 was thought to have killed more than 300,000 people. The UN troops from Nepal came to Haiti.
There was an outbreak of the disease in Kathmandu before the troops went to Haiti. The first case of the disease in Haiti was reported in a man who bathed and drank from a river two kilometers away from the camp.
A panel of experts from the UN found that the outbreak began in a UN camp and that the strains of the disease from Haiti and Nepal were a perfect match. Though it did not assume legal responsibility, the UN admitted that it had played a part in the epidemic.
After three years of no reported cases, scientists don't know how the disease came back in Haiti.
The authors of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote about three possible reasons for the reappearance of the disease.
The first is that since the beginning of the year, there has been a rise in the number of cases due to a lack of clean water and a lack of immunity in the population.
The second possibility is that it may have remained in the environment where it can live for a long time outside of humans.
One of the reasons is that the 2010 outbreak may have spread to other countries in Latin America and one of them may have reintroduced it to Haiti.
The third option is not likely because other countries in the region have not reported recent cases of the disease.
Whatever the cause of the new cases, the authors said, "These findings, along with the resurgence of cholera in several parts of the world, suggest that control and prevention efforts must be redoubled."
The original article was published by Business Insider.
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