The outbreak began in October of 2010. Haiti had previously been cholera-free for more than 100 years. Prior to the arrival of United Nations peacekeepers, Haiti had not seen a cholera outbreak in decades.
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French epidemiologist Roland Piarroux has said the scope of the cholera epidemic is “unprecedented” in recent history. It found that a local contractor failed to properly sanitize the waste at the United Nations base.
More than 700,000 Haitians have become ill with cholera and the death toll has climbed to almost 10,000, but some scientists believe it is much higher. The illness causes dehydration and can lead to death, sometimes in just a few hours, if left untreated. The patient loses so much fluid so quickly that the disease can prove fatal in a matter of days.
Dr Renaud Piarroux, a pediatrician who was among the first to sound the alarm over the outbreak of cholera, recently visited the country and reported that the incidence of the disease and the lack of any infrastructure to deal with its spread were still alarming. Once cholera got a foothold in Haiti, it ran rampant in the country’s open sewers and untreated water supplies. These two outbreaks shared many environmental preconditions-warm water, urban crowding, poor sanitation and raw sewage.
The reference to the UN’s “involvement in the initial outbreak” was greeted as a breakthrough by groups working with cholera victims.
In December 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced a $2.27 billion initiative to help eradicate cholera in Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, but the ambitious 10-year plan is underfunded.
But a statement from Farhan Haq, a spokesperson for United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, initially reported by the New York Times, suggests the organisation is ready to accept its involvement. “How to resolve this”.
They say U.N. peacekeepers were responsible for introducing a cholera epidemic in Haiti in October 2010, following the massive natural disaster that hit the impoverished Caribbean nation.
“It’s been a long time coming”, she says.
“Victims are living in fear because the disease is still out there”, Mario Joseph, a prominent Haitian human rights lawyer representing cholera victims, told demonstrators in Port-au-Prince last month.
This recent shift from the United Nations comes after the release of a highly critical report from New York University law professor Philip Alston who took issue with the organization’s lack of responsibility and inhumane handling of the crisis that he says undermines the U.N.’s integrity and creditability on a global stage.
Concannon says the U.N.’s position has been an “affront to [the] dignity” of Haitians: “This big organization that has been tasked by the world to promote human rights and accountability and the rule of law has been denying something that was so clearly undeniable”.
When asked whether the United Nations was saying for the first time that it was responsible for the outbreak, Haq said, “I don’t have anything to say about that”.
Before 2010, cholera had been unknown in Haiti for at least a century.
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Those families and others then sued the United Nations, including Ban and the former Minustah chief Edmond Mulet, in federal court in NY.
