Sok Reaka, a 6-month-old suspected cholera patient from Kampong Speu province, watches a nurse tend to him at Kantha Bopha Children’s Hospital in Phnom Penh last week.
There's cholera in Cambodia.
The good news is that the fatality rate is low on the reported cases, and maybe the bad news is that it's tough to really tell because there's probably a lot of unreported cases, and bad diarrhea in general at this time of year.
The odd part, is that the Health Ministry held a press conference Friday publicizing the confirmed cases but couldn't man up in the press release.
The joint statement with the WHO advises the public about "an increase in the number of cases of severe acute watery diarrhoea since November 2009", and the part where it actually mentions cholera is buried in Latin:
"To date, 128 laboratory confirmed cases of severe 'rice-water' diarrhoea caused by the Vibrio Cholerae bacterium have been identified in Phnom Penh, Kandal, Takeo, Banteay Meanchey, Kampong Speu and Prey Veng provinces -- 127 cases were treated successfully with fluid replacement therapy and antibiotics and have fully recovered."
The health minister said they don't want to make people panic, and the WHO has pointed out that the treatment is the same for cholera and severe diarrhea (lots of oral rehydration). Reasonable, but it's a way, way different reaction than the official awareness campaigns that followed swine flu and bird flu outbreaks.
The main hospital that called for the government to publicize the cases was Kantha Bopha Children's Hospital. Last week there reporter Brooke Lewis and I met children confirmed with and suspected of having cholera, including a 6-month-old boy, Sok Reaka, who had just arrived from Kampong Speu province an hour earlier and was being tested for cholera.
We ran his photo in black and white, which we haven't haven't really done except for art photography. In talking about it to one of our graphic designers, Andy Ball, we thought the color was distracting; the red took away too much attention from Reaka's eyes or the nurse holding his hand. So we flipped it. I haven't done this a lot, and we ended up using a method I got from a former editor, Mark Roy: change the image to Lab color, go to channels, delete the b channel, then delete the Alpha 2 channel. Adjust curves, change mode to Grayscale, then change back to RGB or CMYK.
I would think that a lot more data gets lost than is wanted (necessary?) in the move to Grayscale, but I mostly like what I've seen so far. The printed version we ran actually could've used more black, but I'll chalk that up to never having output a B&W image for this printer/paper before.
