In 2010, after the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed upwards of 150,000 people, the United Nations began assembling a peacekeeper force to help maintain order in the shattered country. The UN staffers were housed in a basic camp along one of the country's main rivers, the Arbonite. Very basic, apparently, because the primitive sanitation there allowed human waste to spill directly into the water.
That year, adding to the earthquake's miseries, a lethal cholera epidemic began to spread through the country. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the disease was first reported in October 2010 and by May of this year had sickened more than 650,000 people and killed more than 8,000. A United Nations investigation, published last year, raised a possibility that the agency's camp was a source but also carefully avoided assigning any blame or particular responsibility.
This month, four scientists involved with the UN report, published an independent analysis that draws the UN connection far more directly. In particular, they suspect that members of the peacekeeping staff from Nepal brought an Asian variant of the cholera bacterium with them and the poor sanitation at the camp spread it in a country with no immunity to that pathogen.
Or as they put it:
The exact source of introduction of cholera into Haiti will never be known with scientific certainty, as it is not possible to travel back in time to conduct the necessary investigations, and those on the ground at the time focused on outbreak response not source introduction. However, the preponderance of the evidence and the weight of the circumstantial evidence does lead to the conclusion that personnel associated with the Mirebalais MINUSTAH facility were the most likely source of introduction of cholera into Haiti.
— Deborah Blum
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