Cholera cases continued to be reported in Haiti throughout 2024 as the disruption of water and sanitation systems caused by the gang offensive, the ongoing displacement of populations into sites without adequate sanitation, and the collapse of community health infrastructure created persistent conditions for waterborne disease transmission. The cholera situation in 2024, while not escalating to the epidemic levels of 2022, remained a public health concern that the crisis environment made difficult to address.
The gang offensive of early 2024 had specifically disrupted some of the water treatment and distribution systems that public health interventions had worked to restore following the 2022 outbreak. Displacement into crowded sites without functioning sanitation created new transmission clusters. Healthcare workers who had been maintaining surveillance and response capacity found their ability to operate constrained by the same security conditions affecting all humanitarian activities.
MSF and other medical organizations maintained treatment capacity for cholera cases in facilities they could keep operational, preventing the outbreak from escalating to the severity of 2022. But the underlying conditions — inadequate water infrastructure, crowded displacement sites, limited healthcare access — that had produced the 2022 outbreak had not been addressed and continued to create risk for ongoing transmission.
Public health experts maintained that cholera in Haiti was a solvable problem — the disease could be eliminated with adequate investment in water and sanitation infrastructure and sustained healthcare capacity. The barriers were not technical but political and security-related: the governance conditions needed to implement lasting water infrastructure improvements simply did not exist while the security crisis continued.