JEREMIE, Haiti — At least 470 people have died in just one district of the southwest region of Haiti devastated by Hurricane Matthew as the country braces for a rise in cholera cases and grapples with what could become the worst humanitarian crisis since a catastrophic 2010 earthquake.

The coordinator for the Civil Protection Agency in Grand-Anse, Fridnel Kedler, told The Associated Press on Saturday that officials still have not been able to reach two communities in that department three days after Matthew hit as a Category 4 storm.

“The death toll is sure to go up,” he said.

Haiti’s government has estimated that at least 350,000 people need some kind of assistance, and officials are especially concerned about Grand-Anse, located on the northern tip of the southwest peninsula, where they believe the death toll and damage is highest. When Category 4 Hurricane Flora hit Haiti in 1963, it killed as many as 8,000 people.

Haiti’s overall death toll remains unknown. Death counts are frequently difficult to tabulate in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster in any country, though it is particularly difficult in remote and mountainous southwest Haiti.

Reports of deaths in those areas were slow to reach the Civil Protection Agency’s headquarters in Port-au-Prince, where authorities said Saturday that the official death toll for the whole country so far was 336 people. It wasn’t immediately clear whether some of the 470 deaths in Grand-Anse were included in that count. The agency also said that more than 60,000 people remained in shelters.

Advertisement

Health officials in Jeremie, the main city of Grand-Anse, were reporting a growing number of cholera patients as clinics struggled to emerge from the storm’s aftermath.

Petuelle Fontaine, a health worker overseeing the open-air cholera treatment center in a corner of Jeremie’s main hospital, said they were ill-equipped to deal with patients

“We have no cholera vaccines here. None,” she said as sweat dripped from her brow while she tended to the sick.

Eighteen patients arrived on Friday, and another nine showed up early Saturday.

Among them was Bellot Phafoune, a pregnant woman who said she started getting cholera symptoms on Friday.

“I didn’t want to take any chances and rushed here,” said Phafoune, who was from a rural village about an hours’ drive away from Jeremie.

The Pan American Health Organization and other groups have warned of a surge in cholera cases because of the widespread flooding unleashed by Matthew. An ongoing cholera outbreak had already killed roughly 10,000 people and sickened more than 800,000 since 2010, when the infectious disease was introduced into the country’s biggest river from a U.N. base where Nepalese peacekeepers were deployed.

U.N. officials said the agency’s Central Emergency Response Fund was releasing $5 million to help Haiti. Earlier this week, the fund released a loan of $8 million to UNICEF to boost response to Haiti’s cholera epidemic.


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.