Tag: cholera

Annie is a beacon of hope in her community in Zambia. She’s on a mission to empower and educate her friends and neighbours about the dangers of deadly cholera.

Melinda and her family live in a town called John Laing in Lusaka, Zambia. She was nearly nine months pregnant when she went to a local clinic, thinking she was in labour. Once they ran some tests on her, however, Melinda was told something no pregnant woman would ever want to hear.

Oxfam’s Caroline Gluck has documented plenty of examples of Oxfam’s hygiene promotion activities – in communities, schools and markets – but never in a prison. Until now…

In late May 2011, a new outbreak of cholera emerged in Haiti’s Carrefour area, south of Port-au-Prince. Oxfam is responding to the situation, coordinating our work with other agencies in the area.

In the camps where Oxfam works in Port-au-Prince, displaced people are beginning to pay for their own water, an important step towards empowering them to take responsibility for the resource.

Since the first cases of cholera appeared in Haiti in October 2010, Oxfam has taken action to prevent it’s spread. We’ve reached more than 700,000 people with sanitation and hygiene promotion programs since. Sophie Martin Simpson, Oxfam’s Monitoring and Evaluation Officer in Haiti, explains what we and local communities have achieved.

Promoting health and hygiene is a major challenge in Haiti. In addition to barriers such as inadequate sanitary conditions and limited access to clean water, popular beliefs are one the most difficult barriers to overcome.

Our water engineers and program staff in Haiti are teaching people how to purify their water supplies to stop the spread of cholera. In this video, staff in the Artibonite region talk about the techniques they’re using, and demonstrate how they’re checking the purified water to make sure it’s safe to drink.

Julie Schindall, Oxfam’s media officer in Haiti, discusses our public health work in response to the Cholera outbreak in Haiti.

In this short video, I talk to Krissy Nicholson, Oxfam’s Hygiene Promotion Coordinator, about our network of communty health promters in Papua New Guinea (PNG). These volunteers are helping Oxfam to spread the message about clean water and hygiene throughout their communities.

In the past ten months, a country that initially faced extreme poverty has dealt with a devastating earthquake, heavy rains and storms, and now a fast-spreading cholera epidemic. For outsiders, Haiti’s recovery seems frustratingly slow. For organizations working here, the question is where to start?

With Hurricane Tomas bearing down on Haiti and expected to make landfall on Friday, Oxfam is worried about the ability of the humanitarian community to mount a third simultaneous emergency response in Haiti while still responding to January’s earthquake and the cholera outbreak earlier this month.

In central Haiti, the Artibonite province is awash in water. As we drive through the cholera-stricken region on Sunday, day three of our emergency cholera response, I see water everywhere – rice paddies, irrigation canals, small rivers, cesspools and puddles.

Still recovering from a devastating 7.0 earthquake in January, impoverished Haiti is now dealing with an outbreak of the deadly, water-borne disease cholera. The fast-moving bacterial disease has killed 208 people so far and infected another 2,649 – mostly in rural areas of the Artibonite region, north of Port-au-Prince.