President Leonel Fernandez held an emergency strategy meeting with his cabinet to discuss ways to combat the disease, a day after health officials diagnosed a 32-year-old Haitian-born man with cholera in the Dominican Republic.

"The decision was made to tighten health controls along the border," health minister Bautista Rojas Gomez hold reporters during a break in the cabinet meeting.

"With respect to water, there will be stricter oversight, including chlorination throughout the country."

Local media said the government would also bar Haitians from working in the construction and tourism sectors.

The measures by the Dominican government are meant to prevent a cholera outbreak like the one spreading rapidly in its next-door neighbor across the porous, 376-kilometer (234-mile) border.

Rojas Gomez noted that the single confirmed cholera patient had contracted the disease in Haiti, not the Dominican Republic, and stepped straight off a bus from Port-au-Prince to get treatment in a hospital.

If Dominicans follow hygienic measures, drink only potable water and eat cooked foods while border controls remain, there will be "no problem," he said.

Officials in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, also have conducted home searches to find cases of the highly contagious ailment. Rojas Gomez said there have 12 suspected cases of cholera so far in the Dominican Republic, with 11 of them testing negative.

Yet local media reported other infections that have not yet been officially confirmed.

Meanwhile, about 200 Haitian migrants suspected of trying to get across the border without proper documentation were arrested on their way to the northern city of Santiago as the Dominican Republic stepped up its border checks.

The government has also dispersed more information to further encourage people to take the necessary hygiene measures, restricted street vending, limited trade with Haiti and conducted medical examinations of food vendors.

Rojas Gomez also noted that a million leaflets had been ordered printed in the Creole dialect spoken in Haiti to be delivered on the Haitian side of the border.

Dominican officials worry that the fear of the scourge could have a devastating impact on its tourist industry, the country's main income generator.

"This really is a serious danger," Santos Ramirez of the Dominican Medical Board warned. "Cholera could become a pandemic if it spreads on this side of the island. We must avoid a disaster of that scope."

Authorities fear the cholera epidemic could spread like wildfire if it takes hold in the squalid refugee camps around Haiti's capital, where hundreds of thousands of earthquake refugees live in cramped and unsanitary conditions, and could jump the border into the Dominican Republic.

But cholera is a disease linked to poverty and lack of hygiene, and the Dominican government is equipped with the necessary medical facilities and is in the midst of a major prevention campaign that shields it, Rojas Gomez said.

Haitian health officials said Wednesday that some 1,100 people have died since the disease was first detected in late October and more than 18,000 have been hospitalized.

The cholera outbreak -- the first in half a century in the impoverished Caribbean nation -- is bringing new chaos to Haiti ravaged in a January quake, which killed 250,000 people and left 1.3 million homeless.

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News