At a briefing on Thursday, UN spokesman Farhan Haq said that over the past year, “the UN has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera.”
While the UN didn’t come out and clearly state they were to blame for their role in the cholera outbreak in Haiti in the fall of 2010, human rights groups and others who worked with the thousands of victims of the outbreak were jubilant over the announcement.
While UN figures put the death toll from the cholera outbreak at 10,000 Haitians with thousands of others sickened, The Guardian puts those numbers even higher with 30,000 killed and at least 2.0 million people sickened in the outbreak.
The Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) has been pursuing a class-action lawsuit against the United Nations in an effort to get the world body to accept responsibility for its actions and to pay compensation to the victims. The world body has consistently refused any claim for compensation, claiming it is immune from legal action.
The lawsuit centers around the fact that after the January 12, 2010, earthquake, a UN peacekeeping force of 454 from Nepal were being housed at a base camp by the Meille River in the devastated country. The cholera outbreak was first documented in Mid-October 2010, when people living along the river began dying from the disease.
Nepal was experiencing a cholera outbreak, and many of the peacekeepers sent to Haiti had the disease or were carriers. Waste from the base often leaked into the river, and this is how the disease spread, according to reports. The Haitian population had no natural immunity to the Cholera bacterium and this caused the disease to quickly spread through the population.
Later genetic sequencing by a panel of experts appointed by the UN identified the cholera strain in victims in Haiti as a perfect match to the strain responsible for the outbreak in Nepal. And like smallpox, which was brought to the Americas years ago by Europeans, Cholera was introduced into Haiti, a country that had never experienced the disease before 2010.
Without a doubt, Haiti’s cholera outbreak is by far the largest outbreak of its kind the world has experienced in recent decades, but believe it or not, little to nothing is being done to eradicate it. Dr. Renaud Piarroux, a pediatrician who was among the first to alert the world to the cholera outbreak in Haiti, revisited the island nation recently.
Piarroux writes, “That the current response is not up to the challenge is an understatement.” He has been working continuously to expose the UN’s role in bringing cholera to Haiti and the UN’s efforts at trying to cover it up. The French epidemiologist goes on to say that “neither local politicians nor the international community seems to have taken the measure of the seriousness of the situation”.
It is difficult to calculate the billions and billions of dollars the cholera outbreak has cost, in the lives of victims, medical costs, loss of income, and loss of health. It is definitely more than most of us can imagine. But the real crime is how much it would have cost to screen those 454 peacekeepers sent from Nepal. Studies show it would have cost the UN as little as $2,000 to screen its peacekeepers for cholera.
