The latest outbreak was detected January 6 after a surge in cases of acute diarrhea in the Cuban capital, a city of 2.2 million people, the ministry said in a statement published in the official newspaper Granma.
It said 51 cholera cases had been confirmed.
The Pedro Kouri Institute of Tropical Medicine traced the disease back to the same strain of cholera that caused last year's outbreak in the city of Manzanillo, 800 kilometers (480 miles) east of Havana in Granma province.
That outbreak was declared eradicated August 28, nearly two months after it was first detected. The Havana outbreak "is in a phase of extinction," the ministry said.
It said the cholera was "generated by a food vendor, an asymptomatic carrier of the disease, contracted earlier in other regions of the country," the Health Ministry said.
It first appeared in a working class district called Cerro situated in the center of Havana, between the Plaza of the Revolution and the city's main baseball stadium.
Rumors of a cholera outbreak spread in recent days after doctors and nurses began going door to door in certain neighborhoods to distribute medicines to residents.
"They came to all the houses and said, 'Are you allergic to penicillin?' And they gave us three Doxycycline pills to take, but wouldn't tell us anything. I asked them if it was cholera, and they laughed but didn't tell us anything," a woman told AFP.
The Health Ministry called on the public to pay increased attention to hygiene, urging frequent hand-washing, the drinking of chlorinated water, and careful cleaning and cooking of food.
Preventive measures also were being taken at Havana clinics and schools, various sources told AFP.
The outbreak comes at the height of the tourist season in Cuba, which runs from December to April, when planeloads of travelers descend on the island from Canada, Europe and Latin America. Nearly three million tourists visited Cuba last year.
Cuba was a Spanish colony when the last major cholera epidemic swept the island from 1867 to 1882, leaving nearly 6,000 dead, according to the Medical Sciences Information Center in the western province of Matanzas.
Cuban doctors have gained experience treating the disease in Haiti, which suffered a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 7,900 Haitians since 2010.
Additionally, Cuban scientists have been working in recent years to develop a vaccine against cholera, which causes serious diarrhea and vomiting, leading to dehydration.
It is easily treatable by rehydration and antibiotics, but the ailment can be fatal if not addressed quickly enough.
The outbreak in Haiti, which had never had a recorded case of cholera, has since spread to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and the United States.
Suspicions as to the source of the Haitian outbreak have centered on a base for UN peacekeepers from Nepal in the country's Artibonite river valley.
source: interaksyon.com
