Cholera is now projected to spread more than twice as fast as originally estimated across this ravaged country

As many as 200,000 of those cases are expected before the end of the year, with a peak before Christmas, Nigel Fisher, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Haiti, said in an interview.

'When we were in the initial stages of planning, we had said there would be 200,000 cases over six months,' he said. 'Today the figures are 425,000 over six months, of which 200,000 before year's end, with a peak before Christmas.'

The predictions reflect the explosive nature of the cholera epidemic, which erupted in rural Haiti in October but has since spread to each of the country's 10 regions, as well as Port-au-Prince, where more than 1.3 million displaced earthquake survivors live in crowded camps.

Officially, the disease had sickened 66,593 people and killed 1,523 as of Monday, according to the Ministry of Health. But the real number of cases is likely much higher, health officials acknowledge, partly because the systems used to count the ill aren't capturing every nonhospitalized case.