The Dominican Republic struggled Wednesday to slow the advance of a raging cholera epidemic from neighboring Haiti Wednesday, after discovering the first case of the highly contagious disease within its borders.
President Leonel Fernandez held an emergency strategy meeting with his cabinet to brainstorm on ways to combat the disease, one day after the health officials announced that a 32-year old Haitian-born man was the country's first cholera case.
"The decision was made to tighten health controls along the border," health minister Bautista Rojas Gomez hold reporters during a break in the cabinet meeting.
"With respect to water, there will be stricter oversight, including chlorination throughout the country," he said.
The measures by the Dominican government are meant to prevent a cholera outbreak like the one spreading rapidly in its next-door neighbor.
Officials in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, also have conducted home searches to find cases of the highly contagious ailment.
Meanwhile increased border checks have led to the detention of 170 people suspected of trying to get across the border without proper documentation and who may be infected, authorities said on Tuesday.
Dominican health officials said its one confirmed cholera patient, who is being treated in the hospital, had returned from Port-au-Prince shortly before falling ill.
Dominican officials worry that the fear of the scourge could have a devastating impact on its tourist industry, the country's main income generator.
"This really is a serious danger," Santos Ramirez of the Dominican Medical Board warned. "Cholera could become a pandemic if it spreads on this side of the island. We must avoid a disaster of that scope."
Authorities fear the cholera epidemic could spread like wildfire if it takes hold in the squalid refugee camps around Haiti's capital, where hundreds of thousands of earthquake refugees live in cramped and unsanitary conditions, and could jump the border into the Dominican Republic.
Haitian health officials said Wednesday that some 1,100 people have died since the disease was first detected in late October and more than 18,000 have been hospitalized.
The cholera outbreak — the first in half a century in the impoverished Caribbean nation — is bringing new chaos to Haiti ravaged in a January quake, which killed 250,000 people and left 1.3 million homeless.
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