Dr. Louise Ivers Details Effective Strategy for Eliminating Cholera

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Jeff Marvin, Media Relations Manager
jmarvin@pih.org

BOSTON (December 9, 2016) – The need for an integrated approach to cholera treatment, including mass vaccination, is key to eliminating transmission of the disease in Haiti, writes Dr. Louise Ivers, senior health and policy adviser for Partners In Health (PIH), in The New England Journal of Medicine this week.

“Mass vaccination in Haiti would save lives, and modeling suggests that such an intervention, coupled with targeted, effective water, sanitation and hygiene interventions, could substantially control, if not eliminate, the disease within a few years of the program’s introduction, at an affordable cost,” wrote Dr. Ivers.

Dr. Ivers, representing the consensus opinion of a Special Consulting Group to Haiti’s Minister of Health and Population, commended the recent government-led campaign to vaccinate more than 700,000 people in the south of Haiti, and called for the inclusion of a nationwide two-dose oral cholera vaccination campaign as part of the National Plan for the Elimination of Cholera in Haiti.

“Eliminating cholera transmission in Haiti with a combined, integrated approach at the population level would be a major achievement for the government and people of Haiti,” Dr. Ivers continued. “It would also have broad implications for the control of cholera in other affected populations around the world. The time for ambitious action on cholera control and elimination in Haiti is now.”

The United Nations recently apologized for the role it played in the initial outbreak of the devastating cholera epidemic in Haiti. PIH has long been at the forefront of organizations calling on the United Nations to help solve this crisis.

Read Dr. Ivers’s New England Journal of Medicine “Perspective” article here. Learn more about PIH’s campaign to eliminate cholera in Haiti here.

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Partners In Health is an international medical organization that helps build and sustain public health systems in poor and underserved communities around the world. Launched in Haiti in 1987, Partners In Health today reaches 7 million people around the world and employs 18,000 people, including 15,000 local community health workers. Learn more about our work at www.pih.org. 

Together we save lives and spread hope in the poorest places on Earth.