"We greatly fear a flare-up in the capital which would be serious given the conditions in the camps," Doctor Claude Surena, president of the Haitian Medical Association, told AFP.

Haitian authorities have been warned to expect a whole different scale of disaster if cholera takes hold in Port-au-Prince, much of which was flattened by a January earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people.

Most of the estimated 1.3 million Haitians living in refugee camps are in tent cities around the capital and cholera could spread easily in filthy conditions where scarce water supplies are shared for cooking and washing.

The Haitian health ministry says 724 people have now died from the highly contagious water-borne disease and the number of infections around the country has passed the 11,000 mark.

The outbreak, Haiti's first in more than 50 years, erupted in the Artibonite River valley in mid-October and initially seemed to have been contained to central and northern areas.

But there have been roughly 1,000 new cases each day this week and the death curve is getting steadily steeper with 60 new fatalities recorded on Wednesday and more than 80 on Thursday.

More worrying still is the fact that three more deaths have been confirmed in Port-au-Prince, which recorded its first fatality from the disease on Tuesday.

"If cholera cases continue to rise at this rate, we'll quickly be overwhelmed," warned Yves Lambert, head of infectious diseases at the main public hospital in downtown Port-au-Prince.

According to statistics broken down on the health ministry's website, 497 of the deaths, or two-thirds of the total, have been around the epicenter of the outbreak in the northern region of Artibonite.

Surena said the recent surge in deaths and infections was mostly due to a "flare-up" in certain parts of Artibonite, but admitted deep concern also about a possible explosion in cases in the capital.

"We must look out for that and drive up people's awareness about the situation," he told AFP.

Leading humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has said it is extremely concerned at the increase in the number of patients with cholera-like symptoms in the capital's slums.

Oxfam said it had a team of 25 staff working around the clock with a water, hygiene and sanitation program reaching about 100,000 people to distribute soap, water purification tablets, buckets and rehydration salts.

"It is a very serious development that cholera has spread in Port-au-Prince," the organization said in a statement.

"However, it is understandable. With heavy rains and flooding over the weekend, in an environment where there is poor sanitation, water-borne diseases like cholera spread very rapidly."

Hurricane Tomas, which claimed more than 20 lives in Haiti at the weekend, aggravated the situation as it dumped heavy rains that caused rivers, including the believed source of the cholera, the Artibonite, to flood.

The storm damage has increased concern about the plight of Haitians in rural areas, where many cholera sufferers are reported to be struggling to get medical help, some of them in villages cut off by the flooding.

Desperate scenes were described in the major northern town of Gonaives where some 60 people were said to have died with cholera-like symptoms in the past few days.

"Sick people died on the way to the hospital, the bodies were covered in blankets and left near the town cemetery," mayor Adolphe Jean-Francois told AFP.

The Pan American Health Organization, the regional office of the UN's World Health Organization, has warned Haiti to expect hundreds of thousands of cases over several years now that the disease appears to have taken hold.

"The epidemic of cholera, a highly contagious disease, is no longer a simple emergency, it's now a matter of national security," the director of the Haiti's health ministry, Gabriel Thimote, told a press conference Tuesday.

Although easily treated, cholera has a short incubation period and causes acute diarrhea that can lead to severe dehydration and death in a matter of hours.

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