MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

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

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.