05 November 2010

Sure, blame the Gurkhas

Zachary Roth has an article at Yahoo! News about the cholera outbreak in poor, beleagured Haiti:
An outbreak of cholera has killed at least 442 people in Haiti over the last few weeks. Some public health experts are asking whether UN peacekeepers are responsible.
Last week, hundreds of Haitians denounced the peacekeepers at a protest. They suspected that a Nepalese UN peacekeeping base, located on a tributary to the infected Arbonite River, could have been the source of the outbreak.
Some preliminary evidence supports that suspicion. The strain matches strains found in Southeast Asia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Paul Farmer, an expert on poverty and medicine and the UN deputy special envoy to Haiti, told the Associated Press that authorities should investigate further. "Knowing where the point source is would seem to be a good enterprise in terms of public health."
John Mekalanos, a cholera expert at Harvard University, agreed, saying the evidence does suggest that Nepalese soldiers brought the disease to Haiti after an outbreak in Nepal. "The organism that is causing the disease is very uncharacteristic of Haiti and the Caribbean, and is quite characteristic of the region from where the soldiers in the base came," Mekalanos told the AP. "I don't see there is any way to avoid the conclusion that an unfortunate and presumably accidental introduction of the organism occurred."
But the CDC officials have said it's impossible to pinpoint the source more closely, and that doing so would distract from efforts to fight the outbreak.
A World Health Organization spokesman said finding the cause is "not important right now." Since 2004, about 12,000 UN peacekeepers have been stationed in Haiti to provide security. But some Haitians oppose their presence, and some leaders are seeking to capitalize on the cholera issue to stoke anti-UN sentiment. The cholera outbreak has led to the hospitalization of more than 6,742 Haitians with fever, diarrhea and vomiting.
Mekalanos suggested that political considerations are behind the unwillingness to get to the bottom of the issue. "I think that it is an attempt to maybe do the politically right thing and leave some agencies a way out of this embarrassment," he said. "But they should understand that... there is a bigger picture here." He added: "It's a threat to the whole region."

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