The health ministry¹ in Port-au-Prince has confirmed that the country's cholera² outbreak has reached the Haitian capital.

海地卫生部证实，首都太子港已经爆发霍乱疫情。

Doctors are treating 73 people for the disease, amid fears that it could spread across the quake-hit city.

Meanwhile, the Pan American Health Organisation³ (Paho) says it expects tens of thousands more Haitians to catch cholera（霍乱） in the next few years.

The health ministry says so far 583 people have died in the epidemic⁴.

Dozens of suspected cases are also being investigated in Port-au-Prince, which has feared an outbreak since October.

Across the country, more than 9,000 people are being treated for symptoms of the disease, the health ministry said on Tuesday.

Health minister Ariel Henry said that a sizeable outbreak in Port-au-Prince now appeared likely.

"It's coming," Mr Henry told the AFP news agency.

'Foothold'

The deputy director of the Pan American Health Organisation (Paho), Jon Kim Andrus, said his organisation expected cholera transmission in Port-au-Prince "to be extensive".

Mr Andrus said Paho and other organisations were preparing for a long-running epidemic likely to infect tens of thousands of people across Haiti over the next few years.

"The disease now has a foothold（据点，立足处） in Haiti's river system," he added.

Mr Andrus said that while it is impossible to predict the development of the epidemic in Haiti, for planning purposes Paho has extrapolated（推测） from the 1991 cholera outbreak in Peru, which spread to 16 Latin American countries over six years.

Comparing the population figures of Peru and Haiti and factoring in the number of cholera cases in Peru during the outbreak in the 1990s, the organisation thinks that 270,000 people in Haiti could fall ill.

"But the number in Haiti could be even higher, because the conditions there are worse than in Peru," Mr Andrus told the BBC.

So far the Haitian death rate has also been higher than that registered during the Latin American epidemic, he added.

While trying to educate the population about prevention and treatment of the disease, reducing the fatality⁵（不行，灾祸） rate of the disease in the Caribbean country remained a top priority, Mr Andrus said.