Posted on 07/10/2012 3:11:18 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The number of cholera cases confirmed in eastern Cuba jumped from 30 to 85 over the weekend but the death toll remained at three, one government official said, although independent reports put the deaths at anywhere from five to 15.
Up to five other cases of cholera also were unofficially reported in Havana and dissidents in Guantánamo near the eastern tip of the island reported a handful of cholera-like cases in Caimanera, a village on the edge of the U.S. navy base.
The state-owned TV station in Granma province, where the outbreak hit hardest, suggested residents avoid travelling outside the area while trucks with loudspeakers urged them to boil water and wash their hands often, two residents said.
Public Health officials in the British-run Cayman Islands, just south of Granma, issued a caution against travel to Cuba and U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen warned potential travelers that visiting the island “may put them at risk of becoming ill with cholera.”
The U.S. Center for Disease Control in Atlanta had not issued any special travel notices on Cuba as of Monday evening. Its Web page recommends only general vaccinations, like those for Hepatitis A and B, typhoid
[SNIP]
Cuba once boasted one of the best and broadest public health systems in the Western Hemisphere. It remains capable, but it has been going downhill since the end of the Soviet Union’s massive subsidies in the early 1990s.......
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
I usually associate cholera outbreaks with areas that have suffered a natural disaster of such magnitude as to destroy the sanitation infrastructure. Hurricane, eathquake, the like.
Where you typically have cholera, you have sanitation issues. Your water supply has problems or you just plain gave up on putting an emphasis on sanitation. I can remember my military years and being forced to get cholera shots and questioning them....then being told that lots of deployment sites might be in third-world countries with low sanitation standards.
I usually associate cholera with the presence of United Nations “workers.” (They were the ones that brought it to Haiti after the earthquake).
World’s greatest healthcare system! Obama wants it here.
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