# 5078
Long before cholera broke out in the tent cities, and decades prior to the devastating 7.0 Port-au-Prince earthquake, Haiti endured some of the highest rates of poverty and disease in the western hemisphere.
A little more than a week ago, in Haiti: Three Non-Cholera Health Threats, I wrote about the toll that Malaria, Cyptosporidium, and Acute Respiratory Infections took on that population.
Today, from IRIN PlusNews (hat tip Sharon Sanders at FluTrackers), we have a couple of feature articles on TB and HIV, and how they – along with the earthquake and the cholera epidemic - are inextricably intertwined in the cascading crisis in Haiti.
First a report on the additional threat that cholera places on the 2.2% of Haiti’s population (roughly 120,000 people) who have HIV.
HAITI: HIV-positive people especially vulnerable to cholera
PORT-AU-PRINCE, 22 November 2010 (PlusNews) - As the death toll from the cholera epidemic sweeping through Haiti surpasses 1,000, with more than 19,000 confirmed cases, health officials say people living with HIV are especially vulnerable.
Only about 25 percent of people infected with cholera develop symptoms - mainly watery diarrhoea and vomiting - but people already weakened by illness, malnutrition or pregnancy are particularly at risk.
"[People living with HIV] are very much at risk because they already have a weakened immune system," explained Hanz Legagneur, director of the Ministry of Public Health in the country's West Department.
Next a report on how the living conditions in the 1,300 refugee camps for the survivors of the earthquake – many of whom are crowded into communal tents - are ripe for the spread of Tuberculosis.
HAITI: Combating TB in Port-au-Prince's tent cities
Photo: Tamar Dressler/IRINThousands are still living in tiny tents in the capital, Port-au-Prince
PORT-AU-PRINCE, 17 November 2010 (PlusNews) - Health workers in Haiti are concerned about the spread of tuberculosis (TB) in the tent cities that have housed more than one million people since the massive earthquake in January.
"With the quake this became an emergency," said Macarthur Charles, a doctor with Group for the Study of Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections (GHESKIO), one of the largest HIV- and TB-focused NGOs in Haiti.
Although accurate numbers are impossible to obtain, field reports (well covered on a daily basis by Crofsblog) seem to suggest a higher than expected fatality rate among cholera patients in this epidemic.
Not so surprising given the existing burden of disease in Haiti, long-standing fragmentary health care services, poverty and neglect, and the devastation from January’s earthquake.
Disasters all.
And all no doubt factors that conspire to severely compound the effects of this cholera epidemic.
And they also make solutions that much harder to find.
