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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A cholera outbreak that already has left 250 people dead and more than 3,000 sickened is at the doorstep of an enormous potential breeding ground: the squalid camps in Port-au-Prince where 1.3 million earthquake survivors live. Health authorities and aid workers are scrambling to keep the tragedies from merging and the deaths from multiplying.

Five cholera patients have been reported in Haiti's capital, heightening worries that the disease could reach the sprawling tent slums where abysmal hygiene, poor sanitation, and widespread poverty could rapidly spread it. But government officials said Sunday that all five apparently got cholera outside Port-au-Prince, and they voiced hope that the deadly bacterial disease could be confined to the rural areas where the outbreak originated last week.

'We can prevent it.'
"It's not difficult to prevent the spread to Port-au-Prince. We can prevent it," said Health Ministry director Gabriel Timothee. He said tightly limiting movement of patients and careful disposal of bodies can stave off a major medical disaster.

If efforts to keep cholera out of the camps fail, "The worst case would be that we have hundreds of thousands of people getting sick at the same time," said Claude Surena, president of the Haiti Medical Association. Cholera can cause vomiting and diarrhea so severe it can kill from dehydration in hours.

Doctors Without Borders issued a statement saying that some Port-au-Prince residents were suffering from watery diarrhea and were being treated at facilities in the capital city. Cholera infection among the patients had not been confirmed, however, and aid workers stressed that diarrhea has not been uncommon in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake.

"Medical teams have treated many people with watery diarrhea over the last several months," Doctors Without Borders said.

Aid workers in the impoverished nation say the risk is magnified by the extreme poverty faced by people displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake, which killed as many as 300,000 people and destroyed much of the capital city. Haitians living in the camps risk disease by failing to wash their hands, or scooping up standing water and then proceeding to wash fruits and vegetables.

"There are limited ways you can wash your hands and keep your hands washed with water in slums like we have here," said Michel Thieren, an official with the Pan-American Health Organization in Haiti. "The conditions for transmission are much higher."

Aid groups sending soap, purification tablets

Aid workers are coaching thousands of impoverished families how best to avoid cholera. Various aid groups are providing soap and water purification tablets and educating people in Port-au-Prince's camps about the importance of washing their hands.

Aid groups also began training more staff about cholera and where to direct people with symptoms. The disease had not been seen in Haiti for decades, and many people don't know about it.

Members of one grassroots Haitian organization traveled around Port-au-Prince's camps booming warnings about cholera from speakers in the bed of a pickup truck.

"Many people have become sick," announced Etant Dupain, in front of the Champs de Mars camp by Haiti's broken national palace. "If you have a family member that has diarrhea, bring them to the hospital immediately. Have them use separate latrines."

Alan Boyle writes: Google and the Slooh virtual-telescope company have announced a deal to integrate tens of thousands of pictures captured by Slooh's members automatically into Google Earth's astronomical database. The arrangement could bring scientific crowdsourcing to a whole new level.

Millions of Internet users have already been participating in space-themed projects such as SETI @ Home, Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo, but those projects mostly involve sifting through data collected by the professionals. The collaboration announced today immediately puts images of more than 35,000 celestial objects into a Google Sky layer within the free Google Earth standalone program. New Slooh pictures will be added as soon as they're taken.

Slooh's members go on five-minute missions that put them in control of robotic telescopes in the Canary Islands, Chile and Australia. The remote-control "Space Camera" system allows them to snap pictures of the celestial objects they're seeing over the Internet. Now any Google Earth user will be able to see those pictures by clicking on a link in a data bubble, as illustrated in the screenshot above.

Slooh offers membership packages for "Mission Commanders" that range from $5.95 per month to $49.95 per year. There are also card sets for kids (available from Radio Shack and Toys 'R' Us) and a free membership level that lets you tag along on someone else's mission.

In a news release, Slooh founder Michael Paolucci said he was "thrilled" to announce the deal with Google. "Sharing the view through a live telescope is a powerful experience, one we are pleased to now share with Google's worldwide audience," he said.

In addition to serving up the pictures, Google plans to "broadcast" Slooh astronomy missions and special events such as lunar eclipses.

"Slooh's 'map the universe' layer brings a powerful educational component to Google Earth," Noel Gorelick, technical lead for Sky in Google Earth, said in the news release. "Not only does the ability to explore space live bring a totally new active dimension to the experience, but also gives Google users a deeper awareness of the positions of a myriad of celestial objects."

In a follow-up phone interview, Gorelick said the collaboration with Slooh was an example of Google's Web 3.0 philosophy. "It's live distributed content, with the ability to mash it up in ways that people have not thought of before," he told me. "That's the way Google in general is going. I'm looking forward to more projects along this vein."

Not every Slooh snapshot would go into Google Sky, he said. "Images that are blurry or have clouds in them won't make it through the process. That process will filter out bad images," Gorelick told me.

He acknowledged that the idea of astronomical photo-sharing is not new. Celestia and Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope are among the alternative astronomy programs that offer similar capabilities — through the Celestia discussion forums and the Astrometry Flickr WWT site, respectively. (Microsoft and NBC Universal are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

"You could do the same thing, essentially, in the other things," Gorelick said. "It's just a fair amount of work to do that. The part that we've done is that it's streamlined, automatic."

More about desktop astronomy:

• Trio finds a pulsar ... and so can you
• NASA delivers Mars in high definition
• Rise of the robot astronomer
• Play the galactic slots with Galaxy Zoo