On the third an­niver­sary of the Jan­u­ary 12, 2010 earth­quake that dev­as­tat­ed Haiti killing more than 200,000 peo­ple and leav­ing some 1.5 mil­lion home­less, the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO) is re­port­ing progress be­ing made in re­cov­ery and re­con­struc­tion ef­forts.

A sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment is that the cholera epi­dem­ic case-fa­tal­i­ty rate has been cut by half since the out­break in Oc­to­ber 2010. So said PA­HO con­sul­tant and health sys­tems and ser­vices con­sul­tant Dr Car­lene Radix. Speak­ing to the T&T Guardian by tele­phone on the eve of the an­niver­sary of the day Haiti was struck by the mag­ni­tude sev­en earth­quake, she said: "The cholera epi­dem­ic fa­tal­i­ty rate has dropped sig­nif­i­cant­ly in Haiti."

"The case-fa­tal­i­ty rate has been halved from a high of 2.4 per cent of Haitians who have died from cholera in 2010 down to 1.2 per cent in 2012. "While lev­els have been halved, it's still an on­go­ing is­sue that needs to be ad­dressed." A Jan­u­ary 7 PA­HO cholera up­date said the death toll from the epi­dem­ic was al­most 8,000 and more than six per cent of Haitians were af­flict­ed with the dis­ease.

It added fa­tal­i­ties in Haiti reached 7,912 at De­cem­ber 31, out of 635,980 cas­es and 350,679 hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions. PA­HO's news re­lease list­ed the achieve­ments and chal­lenges of the UN re­lief ef­forts in Haiti in 2012. It said Haiti had made sig­nif­i­cant progress to­ward meet­ing the health and de­vel­op­ment needs of its pop­u­la­tion, but enor­mous chal­lenges re­main.

Dr Jean Luc Pon­celet, man­ag­er of PA­HO's Emer­gency Pre­pared­ness and Dis­as­ter Re­lief pro­gramme was re­port­ed as say­ing, "Wa­ter and san­i­ta­tion are key fac­tors to en­sure the elim­i­na­tion of trans­mis­sion of cholera in Haiti." Oth­er chal­lenges for Haiti's re­con­struc­tion in­clude "build­ing back bet­ter," said Pon­celet. That means en­sur­ing that new build­ings and pub­lic works in­fra­struc­ture are built to with­stand the im­pact of earth­quakes and oth­er dis­as­ters.

PA­HO/WHO have been re­port­ed­ly work­ing with Haiti's Min­istry of Pub­lic Health to en­sure that hos­pi­tals and oth­er health fa­cil­i­ties are built or re­paired to be safe in the event of fu­ture dis­as­ters. T&T Guardian re­porter Michelle Loubon flies to Haiti on Mon­day to re­port on the coun­try's re­cov­ery from the earth­quake three years ago. –with re­port­ing by Charles Kon Soo

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Progress made so far in re­cov­ery and re­con­struc­tion ef­forts in­clude:

�2 Hous­ing so­lu­tions pro­vid­ed to more than 158,000 fam­i­lies af­fect­ed by the earth­quake

�2Twen­ty thou­sand fam­i­lies re­turned to their neigh­bour­hoods

�2Near­ly three mil­lion chil­dren un­der ten vac­ci­nat­ed against po­lio, measles and rubel­la

�2More than 470,000 tem­po­rary jobs (40 per cent of them oc­cu­pied by women) and 20,000 per­ma­nent jobs cre­at­ed

�2Near­ly 200 schools com­plet­ed with wa­ter and san­i­ta­tion fa­cil­i­ties in earth­quake-af­fect­ed ar­eas

�2Eighty per cent of de­bris re­moved.