Aid groups sought to ramp up their work in the wake of deadly violence which had hampered the anti-cholera battle, while the United Nations starkly warned that the global community has lagged in its assistance since the epidemic began in October.

"The number of (cholera) focal points of infection are increasing, and those that appeared a month ago are not extinguished," said French doctor Gerard Chevallier, a cholera specialist studying the epidemic and advising Haiti's Health Ministry.

"There were about 20 communities at the beginning of the cholera, and there are now about 50 to 100 communities affected," he told AFP.

Among them is the teeming capital Port-au-Prince, where authorities now report 64 deaths from the disease, including 20 children under age five.

Fears have swelled that the outbreak could explode if it takes hold in the capital's squalid tent cities that are housing several hundred thousand earthquake survivors in unsanitary conditions.

But aid group Oxfam International said that as of Sunday the camps had not seen dramatic infection rates.

"In all the camps where we have been working since the earthquake, we have not had one single confirmed case of cholera," Raphael Mutiku, head of Oxfam's water and sanitation operation in Haiti, said in a statement.

"Most of the cases of cholera in Port-au-Prince are in slums that did not receive post-earthquake relief."

The group has provided more than 315,000 people with clean water and sanitation services, which are vital weapons in the fight against cholera, which thrives in unsanitary conditions.

The Health Ministry said that of 52,715 total recorded cases, 20,687 had been treated in hospital, the majority of whom were given rehydration treatments and released.

But some experts and residents fear the epidemic is being underestimated, with vast areas of the country still not reached by health authorities tracking the outbreak.

In the northern city of Hinche, the manager at a cholera treatment center, where the dead were being laid out on the front lawn, said he feared the outbreak was worsening.

"It is changing in a negative way," Prince Pierre Soncon said, confirming four deaths at the center on Saturday alone.

"At the beginning of the epidemic there were three cases per day, then 15, then 35. This morning, we had already seen 60."

Chevallier, the French doctor, warned that the "unusual" month-old epidemic could be far more severe than the figures suggest.

A senior UN official on Saturday expressed disappointment with the international response to its appeal for 164 million dollars to help Haiti combat the epidemic.

"So far we only have received less than 10 percent of what we need," said UN Humanitarian Coordinator Nigel Fisher.

"Critical supplies and skills are urgently needed," he added. "We need doctors, nurses, water purification systems, chlorine tablets, soap, oral rehydration salts, tents for cholera treatment centers and a range of other supplies."

The response has been slowed by recent violence in Cap Haitien, where protests led to a days-long delay in anti-cholera efforts, after protests by hundreds of people who accused the UN mission of importing the disease.

UN authorities urged an end to the protests, stressing that aid groups could only do their work if conditions were secure. Conditions were largely calm on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Haiti's election campaign was in full swing, despite calls by four underdog presidential candidates to postpone the November 28 vote.

Colorful campaign posters were visible in remote villages, and on Sunday residents lined up in Petionville, a suburb of the capital, to obtain identity cards allowing them to vote for the successor to President Rene Preval.

One of the front-runners in the campaign, businessman Charles Henri Baker, told AFP he opposed a delay -- and hinted at frustration with how authorities have handled the outbreak.

"Cholera will be here for 10 years," Baker said. "The sooner we remove the government, the sooner we can take action against the epidemic."

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