Article:
Signs Of The
Last Times
Haiti began three days of mourning on Sunday
for the hundreds killed in Hurricane Matthew, while the looming threat of a potential food crisis and cholera epidemic promises to compound a dire and complex humanitarian crisis on the impoverished island. As many as 900 people were killed when Matthew made landfall in Haiti on Tuesday pummeling the island with torrential rains and 140 mph (220 kph) winds for several days."People did not expect the damage Matthew caused. People were not ready. It's breathtaking and devastating," said Ruth Augustin, a nurse based in Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince.
The Category 4 storm, the worst to hit the region in a decade, flattened tens of thousands of houses on the island, where even before the storm thousands of people had remained living in tents in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 2010. The storm wiped out up to 80 percent of crops in some areas, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, placing pressure on food resources and forecasting low exports for the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, whose economy is heavily dependent on agriculture.
As a result, the UN expects many of Haiti's rural residents to migrate into city slums bringing with them a likely resurgence of cholera amid deteriorating sanitary conditions.
Over 60 cases of the water-borne disease have so far been reported, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said in a statement that it "expects an important upsurge in cholera cases...given the context of flooding and the storm’s impact on water and sanitation infrastructure, which is still being assessed." "Because of the situation on the ground, providing access to clean water and sanitation is essential. We are working to reduce the vulnerability but it is still a huge concern," Shenhar says.
Haiti has been struggling to curb
a cholera epidemic which has killed nearly 10,000 people in the country since it emerged in October 2010 in the vicinity of a base housing United Nations peacekeepers during the earthquake response. Combating the outbreak has posed a major challenge in Haiti, where the UN says 72 percent of residents have no toilet at home and 42 percent lack access to clean drinking water.The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) expect that half of Haiti’s population of 11 million people have been impacted by the storm, with at least 350,000 people in need of immediate assistance.
