Months after a severe earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, UN peacekeeping troops exacerbated Haitians’ suffering by introducing cholera to the island. After Hurricane Matthew, cholera cases are surging again, and the UN admits it has a moral responsibility to address the situation.
Haiti’s cholera epidemic began in late 2010, following the earthquake that devastated the country. Now, the country is requesting international funds for a 10-year-plan that can not only eliminate cholera transmission, but strengthen public health overall.
Deborah Sontag’s New York Times piece “Haiti’s Cholera Outraced the Experts and Tainted the UN” is a reminder that while public attention to the earthquake-ravaged country has waned, cholera still presents a major threat to the country’s people. It’s also just a sad story about how one apparently small malfunction can have disastrous consequences for […]
Two years ago, a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing 300,000 Haitians and leaving 1.5 million homeless. Nine months later, a cholera epidemic began — its first victim a 28-year-old man who bathed in and drank from a river that was likely contaminated by raw sewage from an encampment of UN peacekeepers from Nepal. Half a […]
Cross-posted from the American Geophysical Union’s GeoSpace blog. Even though the deadly cholera epidemic in Haiti is now spreading more slowly, health officials are still working to prevent as many new cases as possible. Detailed models of the disease’s spread help those in charge of making public health decisions understand the effectiveness of control measures, […]
Cholera has killed roughly 3,800 people in Haiti and sickened another 189,000, and it will continue to circulate in the population for the foreseeable future. The good news is that the number of new cases per week has dropped from 12,000, which it reached in November, to about 4,700, and the mortality rate has also […]
One year after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed more than 200,000 Haitians and left 1.5 million homeless, conditions in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation are still grim. Cholera has killed 3,600 people and weakened many more; the UN warns that 650,000 may be affected over the next several months, and the death rate from the disease […]
Given that Haiti is suffering from the devastation of a major earthquake and a cholera epidemic, it’s not surprising that voters yesterday encountered disorganized polling places where many were told their names weren’t on the rolls. But there were also reports of violence and intimidation, polling places being ransacked and ballot boxes ripped open, and […]
When severe flooding in Pakistan left millions of people without food, shelter, and water, I wrote a post wondering why that disaster was getting less attention than Haiti’s earthquake. I suspected the gradual nature of the disaster was part of the problem, and commenters had additional suggestions, ranging from Haiti’s closeness to the US to […]
Haiti’s health ministry has reported that the death toll from the cholera epidemic has reached 917, and 14,642 victims have been hospitalized. The disease has been detected in six of the country’s ten provinces, and the World Health Organization predicts that 200,000 Haitians will fall ill with cholera over the next six to 12 months. […]