Cuba’s second cholera outbreak in four months — after 130 years without the disease — has sickened more than 50 people and killed one in Havana, authorities and the family of the deceased said on Tuesday.
The latest outbreak was from the same cholera strain found to have been introduced in Haiti by Nepalese UN peacekeepers, unleashing an epidemic in 2010 that has killed about 7,900 people.
Miriam Rodrmguez, who lives in the Havana neighborhood most affected by the outbreak, said her son, Ubaldo Pino, a 46-year-old barber, succumbed to the disease on Jan. 6.
“He died of cholera and that is what is on his death certificate,” she said.
Authorities have not officially confirmed the cause of his death.
The Health Ministry said the outbreak was detected in Havana, a city of 2.2 million people, on Jan. 6 after a surge in cases of acute diarrhea. It said 51 cholera cases had been confirmed.
The Pedro Kouri Institute of Tropical Medicine traced the disease back to the same strain of cholera that caused last year’s outbreak in the city of Manzanillo, 800km east of Havana in Granma Province.
That outbreak, which hit in July and was declared eradicated on Aug. 28, claimed the lives of three people and infected 417.
It was the first time cholera had been reported on the Caribbean island since 1882.
The cholera was “generated by a food vendor, an asymptomatic carrier of the disease, contracted earlier in other regions of the country,” the Health Ministry said.
The latest outbreak first appeared in a working-class district called Cerro in the center of Havana, between the Plaza of the Revolution and the city’s main baseball stadium.
Rumors of a cholera outbreak spread in recent days after doctors and nurses began going door to door in certain neighborhoods to distribute medicine.
“They came to all the houses and said: ‘Are you allergic to penicillin?’ And they gave us three Doxycycline pills to take, but wouldn’t tell us anything,” a woman said. “I asked them if it was cholera, and they laughed, but didn’t tell us anything.”
The Health Ministry called on the public to pay increased attention to hygiene, urging frequent hand washing, the drinking of chlorinated water and careful cleaning and cooking of food.
The outbreak comes at the height of the tourist season in Cuba, which runs from December to April, when planeloads of travelers descend on the island from Canada, Europe and Latin America.
Cuban doctors have gained experience treating the disease in Haiti, which suffered a cholera epidemic that originated in the Artibonite River valley near a base for UN peacekeepers from Nepal.
The outbreak in Haiti, which had never had a recorded case of cholera, has since spread to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and the US.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS