Help PIH Respond to Cholera Outbreak in Haiti

Pictured above: Fatu receives the first of two doses of oral cholera vaccine in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Thank you for your support of Partners In Health / Zanmi Lasante and our efforts to end Haiti’s nearly eight year cholera epidemic.

Though much work remains in the fight against cholera, much progress has been made. PIH’s work in treating and combating the disease in Haiti has opened the door for vaccination campaigns in other countries, including Sierra Leone, where PIH had worked since 2014 and where intense flooding earlier this year threatened a cholera epidemic.

Just five years earlier, a cholera vaccination campaign in Sierra Leone seemed impossible. The vaccine’s $3 price is a week’s rent for roughly half the population. And the Ministry of Health’s immunization department would have been largely powerless to get its hands on a significant amount. As recently as 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) considered a cholera vaccine too expensive to recommend.

But PIH has helped make sure cholera vaccine was available to the world. In Haiti in 2012, PIH and the Haitian Ministry of Health refused to accept that poor people didn’t deserve a $3 vaccine, and had bought and delivered their own cholera vaccines. The program, run by two PIH physicians and the now Executive Director of PIH – Sierra Leone, proved an overwhelming success. Ninety percent of patients received both doses. The WHO promptly changed its position and stockpiled the vaccine.

So when cholera became a clear threat, and Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health asked about ordering the vaccine in late August, WHO representatives replied with hearty encouragement.

By the end of the campaign, as many as 90 percent of half a million people took both doses of the cholera vaccine, a crucial step towards halting any looming epidemic.

From Haiti to Sierra Leone, your support has saved countless lives from being taken by cholera, a treatable and preventable illness. Thank you for your generosity.

Links:

• 'Everyone in Freetown Knows Cholera': Door-to-Door With Vaccine

Thank you for your continued support of Partners In Health / Zanmi Lasante.

Hurricane Irma is rapidly approaching Haiti, and expected to hit several public hospitals and clinics supported by PIH. Experts have labeled Irma a Category 5 hurricane, the most severe form, and expect it to be extremely violent and deadly—particularly in the rural areas where PIH works, and where most people live in houses built from mud, stones, sticks, and corrugated metal. Many are subsistence farmers who rely on their crops, livestock, and fruit trees for food and extra income.

In the short-term, we’ll need help responding to a potential influx of patients seeking emergency medical attention, especially if the storm batters our facilities. In the long-term, we’ll need help responding to potential upticks in cholera and malnutrition, respectively resulting from standing storm water and losses of crops and livestock.

More information is available here: https://www.pih.org/article/pih-braces-hurricane-irma

On behalf of our staff and patients in Haiti, thank you for your generosity during another time of disaster.

Links:

• PIH Braces for Hurricane Irma