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The health ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll hit 1,034 as of Sunday. Figures are released following two days of review.
Aid workers say the government's numbers may understate the epidemic. While the health ministry says more than 16,700 people have been hospitalized nationwide, Doctors Without Borders says its clinics alone have treated at least 16,500.
Health experts have called for an independent investigation into whether Nepalese peacekeepers introduced the South Asian strain of cholera to Haiti, where no case of cholera had ever been documented before late October.
Cholera is transmitted by feces and can be all but prevented if people have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.
But sanitary conditions don't exist in much of Haiti, and the disease has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country's major population centers, including Port-au-Prince. There are concerns it could eventually sicken hundreds of thousands of people.
As the barricades burned, the disease continued spreading across Haiti and potentially the island of Hispaniola. Authorities in the neighboring Dominican Republic reported their country's first confirmed case of cholera in Higuey, near the tourist mecca of Punta Cana.
The man was a Haitian citizen who had recently returned from a 12-day vacation in Haiti. The news alarmed Dominicans, but the patient was in a hospital and in stable condition, officials said. No locally originated cholera cases have been reported.
[Associated
Press;
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