February 07, 2010
Haiti has the highest Tuberculosis rate in the western hemisphere and the possibility of a severe outbreak has increased, reports the New York Times. The World Health Organization says that TB is the second most deadly infectious disease in Haiti, behind AIDS. However at the clinic which housed the “country’s most infected patients” Pierre-Louis Monfort “runs the clinic alone.”
According to the New York Times:
“The situation has gone from bad to worse because the earthquake set off a dangerous diaspora. Most of the sanatorium’s several hundred surviving patients fled and are now living in the densely packed tent cities where experts say they are probably spreading the disease. Most of these patients have also stopped taking their daily regimen of pills, thereby heightening the chance that there will be an outbreak of a strain resistant to treatment, experts say.”
