By JONATHAN M. KATZ
The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 16, 2010; 7:30 PM

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- An outbreak of cholera has killed more than
1,000 people, the Haitian government said Tuesday as it sent top
officials to the country's north in hopes of quelling violent protests
against U.N. peacekeepers accused of spreading the disease.

As the barricades burned, the disease continued spreading across Haiti
and potentially the island of Hispaniola. Authorities in the Dominican
Republic reported their country's first confirmed case of cholera in
Higuey, near the tourist mecca of Punta Cana.

The man was a Haitian citizen who had recently returned from a 12-day
vacation in neighboring Haiti. The news alarmed Dominicans, but the
spread of the disease is easily prevented with good hygiene and
sanitation, and no locally originated cholera cases have been reported.

Haiti's police chief, the health minister and other Cabinet officials
headed to Cap-Haitien, the country's second largest city, where
protesters erected barricades of flaming tires and other debris and
clashed with U.N. troops. At least two demonstrators died, one of them
shot by a member of the multinational peacekeeping force that has been
trying to keep order since 2004.

A U.N. World Food Program warehouse was looted and burned.

The cholera outbreak that began last month has brought increased misery
to the entire country, still struggling with the aftermath of last
January's earthquake. But anger has been particularly acute in the
north, where the infection is newer, health care sparse and people have
died at more than twice the rate of the region where the epidemic was
first noticed.

The health ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll hit 1,040
as of Monday. Figures are released following two days of review.

Aid workers say the official numbers may understate the epidemic. While
the ministry of health says more than 16,700 people have been
hospitalized nationwide, Doctors Without Borders reports that its
clinics alone have treated at least 16,500.

On Tuesday, during a second day of rioting throughout northern Haiti,
local reporters said a police station was burned in Cap-Haitien and
rocks thrown at peacekeeping bases.

In the town of Limbe, west of Cap-Haitien, the unrest carried through
the night Monday as screams and chants filled the streets, said Beth
Macy, a reporter for The Roanoke Times who accompanied a Virginia
medical mission to Haiti. The group hunkered down in the hospital as
protesters pelted the gate with stones, she said in a newspaper blog post.

President Rene Preval called for the violence to stop Tuesday as rumors
circulated of possible Wednesday protests in Port-au-Prince. He said
barricades were keeping people from getting needed care, and admonished
that looting would not help stem the tide of the disease.

The U.N. canceled flights carrying soap, medical supplies and personnel
to Cap-Haitien and Port-de-Paix because of the violence, the U.N. Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

Oxfam suspended water chlorination projects and the World Health
Organization halted training of medical staff, the U.N. humanitarian
office added in its news release.

The violence has combined some Haitians' long-standing resentment of the
12,000-member U.N. military mission with the internationally shared
suspicion that the U.N. base could have been a source of the infection.

Health experts have called for an independent investigation into whether
Nepalese peacekeepers introduced the South Asian strain of cholera to
Haiti, where no case of cholera had ever been documented before late
October.

The U.N. denies responsibility, and a mission spokesman said the
protests were politically motivated. Haiti's national elections are
scheduled for Nov. 28.

Cholera is transmitted by feces and can be all but prevented if people
have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.

But sanitary conditions don't exist in much of Haiti, and the disease
has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country's major
population centers, including the capital, Port-au-Prince. There are
concerns it could eventually sicken hundreds of thousands of people.

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