telegraph.co.uk Wrote:The government initially estimated that 150,000 had been killed by the quake on Jan. 24.
But Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, the communications minister, said the government now counted 230,000 deaths.
She said the new figure was not definitive and did not include bodies buried by private funeral homes in private cemeteries or the dead buried by their own families.
The new figure gives the quake the same death toll as the 2004 Asian tsunami.
It comes as aid groups warned that disease could kill hundreds more in the second phase of the country's medical emergency.
Doctors said diarrheal illnesses, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition was already claiming lives by the dozen.
And while the half-million people jammed into germ-breeding makeshift camps have so far been spared a contagious-disease outbreak, health officials fear epidemics. They are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.
"It's still tough," said Chris Lewis, emergency health coordinator for Save the Children, which by Tuesday had treated 11,000 people at 14 mobile clinics in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. "At the moment we're providing lifesaving services. What we'd like to do is to move to provide quality, longer-term care,
but we're not there yet."
Some 300,000 people are injured. At Port-au-Prince's General Hospital, patients continue arriving with infections in wounds they can't keep clean because they are homeless. The number of amputees, estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 by Handicap International, keeps rising as people reach Port-au-Prince with untreated fractures.
Nearly a month after the quake, respiratory infections, malnutrition, diarrhea from waterborne diseases and a lack of appropriate food for young children may be the biggest killers, health workers said.
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