Haiti is all set to start vaccinating one lakh people with an oral cholera vaccine “Sahchol” developed by the Hyderabad-based Shantha Biotechnics. According to a news report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the first phase of the campaign will be targeting 50,000 people living in Port-au-Prince and will be followed by a further 50,000 in the Artibonite River valley. The vaccination programme became possible with the Haiti's National Ethics Committee approving the oral cholera vaccine.

A year and a half after cholera first struck Haiti, a tiny portion of the population on Thursday began getting vaccinated against the waterborne disease that has infected more than 530,000 Haitians and killed more than 7,040.

Organizers of the vaccination campaign, who have been pushing to do this since the epidemic began, cleared their final political hurdle this week when a national bioethics committee approved their plan to use all available doses of the cheapest cholera vaccine to immunize about 1 percent of the population.

The family from a nearby village arrived at the small hospital here vomiting and with uncontrollable diarrhea, at first glance maybe a typical case of consuming bad food or water.

But the fluid loss was tremendous and unstoppable; two of the three brothers were already near death, and within hours the entire family would be dead. Meanwhile, a nightmarish stream of patients filled the small reception room, as doctors and nurses scrambled to rehydrate them.

Bangladesh is among five most vulnerable countries to climate change-induced food crisis and hunger, says a report.

It says the 10 countries that rank most vulnerable are DRC, Burundi, South Africa, Haiti, Bangladesh, Zambia, India, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Rwanda, which account for nearly a quarter of the world’s population.

Populations on the run during disasters can be tracked by cellphone signals, which could help guide life-saving aid to the right places, a new study has concluded.

For the study, which appeared last week in the journal PLoS Medicine, researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Columbia University formulated their idea after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and then tried it out in practice during the cholera epidemic that began there 10 months later.

“CHOLERA most forcibly teaches us our mutual connection. Nothing shows more powerfully the duty of every man to look after the needs of others.” So said Titus Salt, a Victorian wool baron who worked to put an end to cholera in Yorkshire. It was cholera, as much as the great stink, which led London’s masters to build vast sewers, install toilets, and promote hygiene. Cholera struck fear into 19th-century cities, sweeping away the rich along with the poor. America’s President James K. Polk died of the disease after a visit to New Orleans.

Tropical Storm Emily took aim at Haiti on Wednesday, threatening to add to the misery of a chronically poor nation struggling to recover from last year's devastating earthquake.

Emily was about 60 miles southeast of Isla Beata in the Dominican Republic, near its border with Haiti, at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

A storm unleashed torrential rains, mudslides and flooding in Haiti, killing at least 10 people, Haitian officials said on Tuesday after thunderstorms pounded several Caribbean countries.

The heavy rainfall across the region, which began over the weekend, comes after the June 1 start of the Atlantic hurricane season and as Haiti and the Dominican Republic grapple with cholera outbreaks that cou