Cholera death toll in Haiti rises to 253

SANTO DOMINGO. October 25. KAZINFORM The death toll from a cholera outbreak in Haiti has risen to 253, said the country's health department on Sunday; Kazinform refers to Xinhua.

Gabriel Thimote, director-general of Haiti's Health Department, told a news conference a total of 3,015 cases have been reported so far in the impoverished island nation that is still recovering from January's devastating earthquake.

"We have registered a diminishing in numbers of deaths and of hospitalized people in the most critical areas...The tendency is that it is stabilizing, without being able to say that we have reached a peak," said Thimote.

Health officials said most of the death cases were reported in the Artibonite region, north of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

They also said at least five people tested positive for cholera in Port-au-Prince, where about 1.3 million survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake packed in squalid camps.

UN officials said the five cases, the first confirmed in the capital since the epidemic started, were people who had become infected in the main outbreak zone of Artibonite before they traveled to the capital; Kazinform cites Xinhua.

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