Cholera has killed at least 13 people in southwest Haiti in the wake of Hurricane Matthew, officials said as government teams fanned out across the hard-hit southwestern tip of the country to repair treatment centres and reach the epicentre of one outbreak.
The storm took the lives of nearly 900 people in Haiti, many in remote towns clustered near the headland, according to a tally of numbers given by local officials.
The government said there would be three days of national mourning.
Six people died of cholera in a hospital in the town of Randel, which is inland on the peninsula, and another seven died in the coastal town of Anse-d'Ainault on the western tip, the officials said, likely as flood waters mixed with sewage.
Cholera causes severe diarrhoea and can kill within hours if untreated. It is spread through contaminated water and has a short incubation period, which leads to rapid outbreaks.
"Randel is isolated, you must cross water, you must go high in the mountains, cars cannot go, motorcycles cannot go," said Eli Pierre Celestin, a member of a team that fights cholera for the health ministry. "People have started dying."
"There are nurses but no doctors," he said, concerned that cholera would spread due to a lack of hygiene and as ground water moved because of rain and floods.
He said there were also outbreaks in Port-a-Piment and Les Anglais at the end of the Tiburon peninsula hardest hit by Matthew this week.
Dr Donald Francois, head of the Haitian health ministry’s cholera programme, said 62 others were sick with cholera as a result of the storm. He said he was traveling to the south to oversee the response.
Port Salut, one of several picturesque beach towns ravaged by waves, wind and rain, counted its first cholera case in seven months yesterday, and two more suspected cases were brought by ambulance to the town's clinic.
US medical aid group Americares dropped off supplies at the clinic, the only building standing among a group of shops flattened by the storm, before trying to reach Port-a-Piment further up the partially flooded coastal road where the storm made landfall. A larger outbreak is suspected there.
Cholera was accidentally introduced to Haiti by United Nations peacekeepers after the 2010 earthquake and has since infected hundreds of thousands of people and killed more than 9,000 of them.
Matthew slammed into South Carolina yesterday, after skirting the Atlantic coast of Florida and Georgia, causing widespread power outages and flooding.
Matthew was a Category 5 hurricane, the most powerful classification of storm, at its peak but was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone today as it headed away from the North Carolina coast.
It killed at least 11 people in the United States.
Officials in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina had urged people along parts of a 600-mile stretch of coast to evacuate. Some two million people were without power and streets were darkened for miles from the coast.
Long lines of cars snaked along the roads leading to Florida's barrier islands, which bore the storm's brunt, after police began to let residents back across.
