The center's entrance reeks of chlorine as the weakened arrivals are sprayed with the chemical before being seen by local medical staff and doctors from Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which manages the clinic.

"We get cases every day, the numbers are increasing day by day," said nurse Juliette Olivier as she hooked up bed-ridden patients to rehydration drips.

Elsie Joseph, 55, had just arrived Wednesday, and began to regain her senses after being placed on the rehydration regime from her bed in the overwhelmed clinic where hundreds of patients are strung out on cots or simply awaiting treatment from the floor.

"I had just drunk a glass of water when I started to feel it," she said, describing acute abdominal pain. "It was the beginning of my ordeal."

The cholera outbreak that erupted out of the Artibonite River valley in central Haiti in mid-October was initially hoped to have been contained in that region.

But since then the toll from the chronic diarrheal disease has soared to 643 dead and just under 10,000 people have been treated in hospital.

Worst fears for the crisis were also realized this week as the disease was detected in the crowded capital Port-au-Prince, where some 1.3 million people live in makeshift tent cities after January's disastrous earthquake. Aid agencies warn the conditions here are ripe for the epidemic to take hold.

"We're trying to stablize patients before allocating the most severe cases for cholera treatment centers" in the city," doctor Raou Plancher told AFP at the MSF clinic in Cite Soleil, a sprawling, desperately poor slum that is home to some 300,000 people.

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.

At least one person has died of cholera in Cite Soleil and hundreds more are being cared for in the MSF centers, two more of which have been set up here to deal with the crisis.

"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 Port-au-Prince, adding that closer work with communities was urgently needed to halt the disease's spread.

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