<div><p>HAITI: Health crisis enters new stage: Deaths from diarrhea, infections, malnutrition</p><p>PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Fourteen-month-old Abigail Charlot survived Haiti's cataclysmic earthquake but not its miserable aftermath. Brought into the capital's General Hospital with fever and diarrhea, little Abigail literally dried up.</p><p>"Sometimes they arrive too late," said Dr. Adrien Colimon, the chief of pediatrics, shaking her head.</p><p>The second stage of Haiti's medical emergency has begun, with diarrheal illnesses, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition beginning to claim lives by the dozen.</p><p>And while the half-million people jammed into germ-breeding makeshift camps have so far been spared a contagious-disease outbreak, health officials fear epidemics. They are rushing to vaccinate 530,000 children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.</p><p>"It's still tough," said Chris Lewis, emergency health coordinator for Save the Children, which by Tuesday had treated 11,000 people at 14 mobile clinics in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. "At the moment we're providing lifesaving services. What we'd like to do is to move to provide quality, longer-term care, but we're not there yet."</p><p>Haiti's government raised the death toll for the Jan. 12 earthquake to 230,000 on Tuesday — the same death toll as the 2004 Asian tsunami. Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said she expects the toll to rise as more bodies are counted, and noted the number does not include bodies buried privately by funeral homes or families.</p><p>___</p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=68776950&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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