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US says Haiti cholera epidemic was imported, probably UN Nepal peacekeepers

Thursday, June 30th 2011 - 20:17 UTC
Full article 2 comments
When the outbreak last year anti-UN riots sparked across the country When the outbreak last year anti-UN riots sparked across the country

Evidence strongly suggests UN peacekeepers from Nepal were the source of a cholera epidemic in Haiti that has killed more than 5,500 people, said a new report by the US Centres for Disease Control Prevention.

The epidemic was one of the most explosive and deadly in recent history, the report said, hitting a country reeling from a January 2010 earthquake that claimed the lives of more than 300,000 and shattered the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Cases of cholera first emerged in central Haiti's Artibonite River region in October and many Haitians said the disease came from the peacekeepers from Nepal, where cholera is endemic.

That belief sparked anti-UN riots last year in the poor Caribbean nation and it posed a serious political problem for UN authorities who already had a peacekeeping force in Haiti and deployed a massive aid effort after the earthquake.

“Our findings strongly suggest that contamination of the Artibonite and one of its tributaries downstream from a military camp triggered the epidemic,” said the report by the Emerging Infectious Diseases unit at CDC, which is based in Atlanta.

“There was an exact correlation in time and places between the arrival of a Nepalese battalion from an area experiencing a cholera outbreak and the appearance of the first cases in Meille a few days after,” the report said.

”The remoteness of Meille in central Haiti and the absence of report of other incomers (newcomers) make it unlikely that a cholera strain might have been brought there another way,” said the report, titled Understanding the Cholera Epidemic, Haiti.

It added that DNA evidence suggests the disease was introduced from a distant source by a single event.
 

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  • GeoffWard2

    Don't get it.
    UN disaster aid workers are given pre-emptive dosing for the diseases of disasters before entering the zone.
    Was this not done?
    It may be true - they may not have had the injections, but I doubt it.
    Much more likely to me is that the USA is doing a pre-emptive propaganda job.

    Jul 01st, 2011 - 04:41 pm 0
  • lsolde

    Geoff,
    African UN soldiers introduced Aids into Cambodia in the 1990's.
    We were in lndonesia at the time & l remember reading about it then.
    lf memory serves me right the soldiers were from Gabon & D.R.of Congo.
    l would have thought that health screening had improved since then, but maybe not.

    Jul 02nd, 2011 - 10:42 am 0
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