The cholera epidemic affecting Haiti looks set to be far worse than officials had thought, experts fear. Rather than affecting a predicted 400,000 people, the diarrhoeal disease could strike nearly twice as many as this, latest estimates suggest.
Aid efforts will need ramping up, US researchers told The Lancet journal. The World Health Organization says everything possible is being done to contain the disease and warns that modelling estimates can be inaccurate.
Before last year's devastating earthquake on the Caribbean island, no cases of cholera had been seen on Haiti for more than a century. The bacterial disease is spread from person-to-person through contaminated food and water.
It causes severe diarrhoea and vomiting, and patients, particularly children and the elderly, are vulnerable to dangerous dehydration as a result.
In the three months between October and December 2010, about 150,000 people in Haiti contracted cholera and about 3,500 died. Around this time, the United Nations projected that the total number infected would likely rise to 400,000.
But researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, say this is a gross underestimate.
They believe the toll could reach 779,000, with 11,100 deaths by the end of November 2011.
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