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cholera

UN Refuses to Compensate Haiti Cholera Victims |

: Haitian boy with cholera; Unicef

The UN continues to deny responsibility for the cholera outbreak in Haiti. It also now claims it is immune from compensating Haitian cholera victims.

UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon told Haiti’s President Michael Martelly that the UN is both unwilling and not required to compensate the victims.

The United Nations advised the claimants’ representatives that the claims are not receivable pursuant to Section 29 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations,” spokesperson Martin Nesirky told reporters in New York.

Evidence that the outbreak came from Nepalese UN peacekeepers is overwhelming, but the UN has yet to claim responsibility. A lawsuit brought against the UN by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) in November 2011 called for a national water and sanitation system, compensation to the victims and a public apology from the UN to the victims. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Justice, cholera, Haiti, United Nations

January 11, 2013 | 1:24 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Three years later: Was the massive humanitarian response in Haiti a success? |

Co-authored by Tom Murphy

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: Immediately after the 2010 quake, many Haitians were given tents as ‘temporary’ shelters. Three years later, nearly 400,000 still live in them. UNDP

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The international community’s response to the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the largest disaster relief responses ever carried out involving many governments, agencies, hundreds of humanitarian organizations and about $9 billion in private donations and foreign government assistance.

So it may be a bit disconcerting that, three years on, the aid and development community still can’t seem to agree on whether the effort should be regarded as largely a success or a failure.

“There are still something like 360,000 people living in tents,” said Nicole Phillips, a human rights attorney with the Institute for Justice and Democracy and Haiti. Philips is speaking today at the University of Washington along with documentary filmmaker Michele Mitchell who is screening her film Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? – a critical analysis of the lack of accountability within the humanitarian community.

: Vijaya Ramachandran

Other aid experts, like Vijaya Ramachandran at the prestigious DC-based think tank the Center for Global Development, have asked the same question. As Ramachandran wrote last spring:

The Government of Haiti has received just 1 percent of humanitarian aid and somewhere between 15 and 21 percent of longer-term relief aid. As a result, NGOs and private contractors in Haiti have built an extensive infrastructure for the provision of social services. Yet, these entities appear to have limited accountability….

But many of those who actually do the work there say this alleged lack of adequate financial accountability doesn’t necessarily mean Haitians did not benefit, that lives were not saved and that many millions of people’s lives have been improved.

“There’s a reason it’s called a disaster,” said Jeff Wright, emergency operations manager for World Vision and a disaster relief worker with lots of experience in Haiti. These situations are always chaotic and hardly ideal for precise bookkeeping, Wright said, adding that Haiti was chaotic and difficult before the quake.

“Are things in Haiti good today? No. Are they better than they would have been had we not responded? Absolutely.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Justice, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, cholera, disaster relief, foreign aid, Global Partnerships, Haiti, Mercy Corps, UN, World Vision

August 23, 2012 | 8:00 AM | By Tom Murphy |

Cholera Concerns Mounting in Sierra Leone |

A cholera outbreak in Sierra Leone that made its way to the capital city of Freetown is spreading at an alarming rate. MSF reported an estimated 1,500 cases and 17 deaths in a July 31 press release. The WHO released new numbers yesterday that cholera has infected 5,706 people since the start of August. They single out Western Aread and Tonkolili as areas with the greatest burden.

Right now, the response is being led by major players such as the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health, MSF, UNICEF and the WHO. At the same time, neighboring Guinea is dealing with its own cholera outbreak. According to MSF, the shared resivor near the coast is a ‘breeding ground for the disease.’

“This ‘coastal cholera’ has already killed some 250 people,” says MSF epidemiologist Michel Van Herp. “The water reservoir allows the Vibrio cholerae bacteria to survive and go on to infect the population.” To respond, organizations are turning their focus onto improving hygiene.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, AP, cholera, Guinea, IFRC, MSF, New York Times, NYT, Red Cross, sierra leone, UNICEF

August 16, 2012 | 8:00 AM | By Tom Murphy |

Catching Up on Cholera in Haiti |

When cholera broke out in Haiti in October 2010, reporter Jonathan Katz* was the first to break the story connecting UN peacekeepers from Nepal to the outbreak. Nearly two years later, Haiti is still struggling to address the issue of cholera and the UN has yet to admit that it was to blame for the outbreak.

I caught up with Jonathan to discuss his original reporting, the outbreak and the UN’s response. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, AP, Associated Press, cholera, Haiti, Jonathan Katz, MINUSTAH, Nepal, Peacekeepers, UN, United Nations

April 12, 2012 | 10:30 AM | By Tom Paulson |

NPR: Update on Haiti’s battle against cholera |

Two reports by NPR’s Richard Knox provide a great overview of the cholera outbreak in Haiti, beginning with coverage of the launch of a (much delayed and fairly small) vaccination campaign aimed not so much at stopping the outbreak as demonstrating vaccines — if more widely used — can stem the epidemic.

Despite yet another tiresome headline riff off Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ book Love in the Time of Cholera, the accompanying report by Knox examines what really drives the cholera explosion — poverty and lack of access to clean water.

FILED UNDER: Health, cholera, Haiti, NPR, Richard Knox

March 7, 2011 | 9:23 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Two views on human impact of climate change |

Researchers at McGill University have mapped out the longer-term impact of climate change on human health and well-being.

If populations continue to increase at the expected rates, the McGill researchers report, those who are likely to be the most vulnerable to climate change are the people living in low-latitude, hot regions of the world, places like central South America, the Arabian Peninsula and much of Africa.

In these areas, a relatively small increase in temperature will have serious consequences on a region’s ability to sustain a growing population. Here’s a direct link to the map (below is screen grab):

McGill University

Human vulnerability to climate change

On a related note, here’s a recent post from my NPR colleague Heather Goldstone at Climatide providing “Two reasons why climate change could be bad for your health.”

One of the reasons is that it could increase bacterial outbreaks, as Heather notes appears to be happening with cholera worldwide. As I’ve noted before, there are some (though a minority) of scientists who believe Haiti’s cholera outbreak was fueled by climate change. The medical community is not trained to think of environmental contributors to human disease, but climate change may require a more interdisciplinary approach.

FILED UNDER: Science, cholera, climate change, disease, food security

January 12, 2011 | 9:16 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Will climate change bring malaria here? |

The common refrain that climate change will bring malaria to U.S. shores again turns out to be cause for heated debate in scientific circles, according to Arthur Allen in the Washington Post:

The room where 10,000 Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes hatch each week is hot and humid and smells like the tropics – an appropriate surrogate for a warming world. The Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute in Baltimore, where the insects are raised, was created with a billionaire’s anonymous donation a decade ago, after a map printed in Scientific American suggested that by 2020 malaria could be breaking out in Baltimore, and across the eastern United States and Europe.

The idea that climate change will bring malaria and other tropical killers to our door turns out to be an extremely controversial one among ecologists, climatologists and biologists such as Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, who runs the “insectary” at Johns Hopkins. “It’s a very complicated story,” says Jacobs-Lorena.

Allen reviews the evidence, and broad consensus, supporting the claim that climate change is expected to expand the range of the mosquitoes that carry malaria. But he quotes some experts who cite other factors causing the spread of disease, such as increased urbanization and poor insect control.

None of this is to say climate change never plays a role in disease. To emphasize the difficulty in establishing cause and effect in disease outbreaks, Allen notes that some high-profile scientists contend Haiti’s cholera outbreak is likely environmental in origin rather than due to human-to-human transmission. I’ve written about this hypothesis a few times on Humanosphere.

The gist of Allen’s article is that whatever climate change may be doing to patterns of disease spread, we don’t have to be helpless victims:

“Whether or not human engineering got us into this mess,” Allen writes, “perhaps it can get us out.”

FILED UNDER: Science, cholera, climate change, Haiti, malaria

December 8, 2010 | 8:00 AM | By Tom Paulson |

No new evidence, but UN again blamed for Haiti cholera |

UN Peacekeeper, Haiti

Haiti is in crisis, in the middle of a muddled election for the next president of this devastated nation, and the media are doing their own muddling regarding the source of its ongoing cholera outbreak.

The epidemic has so far killed more than 2,100, sickened maybe 100,000 and is expected to continue spreading for months.

A Nepalese UN peacekeeping team was accused of bringing cholera with them and spreading it due to improper sanitation. This caused attacks on the UN peacekeepers, rioting and some deaths. Testing of the bacteria by the CDC identified it as a South Asian strain and many concluded the UN team were indeed the culprits.

But some top cholera experts, in fact, believe the outbreak is too big and widespread to have come from a single point source. I posted on this alternative view earlier and talked with one of the scientists, Rita Colwell, former head of the National Science Foundation. Colwell says of the idea that UN troops caused this:

“It’s almost certainly incorrect…. The pattern of distribution and rapid spread across a large area indicates it was already present.”