On the walls of earthquake-battered buildings in Port-au-Prince, Haitians have scrawled their frustration and contempt in black paint. “Minustah=Kolera,” the graffiti reads. It’s an unmistakable message to the United Nations, whose peacekeepers—some sent to assist Haiti after last year’s massive quake—may have inflicted the scourge threatening to sweep the country again.
The world’s worst outbreak of cholera in decades threatens to ravage Haiti anew this fall, and the bacterium—which had not afflicted the island for a century, if ever—has been traced by epidemiologists to a camp where a battalion of U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal arrived a year ago.
On the one-year anniversary of the first reported cases, medical workers at treatment centers in the capital earlier this month reported threefold spikes in patients suffering from the horrific intestinal infection. Cholera has killed 6,600 and sickened 470,000, and the U.N.’s World Health Organization estimates infections could top half a million within months.
“This is far and away the biggest epidemic in the world right now. It’s not unreasonable to worry about 10,000 deaths by the end of the year,” says Paul Farmer, cofounder of the NGO Partners In Health, a nonprofit consortium that provides medical care inside impoverished countries.
Experts long feared a third wave of cholera would strike when Haiti’s fall rainy season arrived and would spread bacteria through runoff and overflowing canals and sewers. Yet humanitarian agencies were unable to mount an effective defense despite months of encouragement from medical professionals to begin a massive vaccination program.
Now Partners In Health, along with another nongovernmental organization called GHESKIO and the Haitian Health Ministry, are searching for funding for their own response: a vaccine program that might reach 100,000 residents beginning in January, in a country where 10 million are threatened.
Read more at The Daily Beast
Related articles
- Combating Cholera with Cell Phones (textually.org)
- One year on, cheap but untested vaccines to be deployed against cholera in Haiti (ktwop.wordpress.com)
- Haiti has worlds highest rate of cholera, UN envoy says (theglobeandmail.com)
- No quick fix for Haiti cholera (nature.com)
As My World Turns 
Leave a comment